G4 Dual 1.25 MDD Tiger Starts Itself!!!

[J. Morgan]

I own a G4 MDD w/ dual 1.25 ghz and 1 Gb ram running OSX Tiger v. 10.4.2.
In the past I have noticed that If i shut it off and head to work, 7 or 8 times out of ten I come home and it is on! I recently went on vacation and turned off and unplugged the power strip that is plugged into so my apartment wasn't sweltering when I returned. (the G4 MDD also doubles as a space heater!) Heres the thing that made me finally reach out for help, when I plugged in and turned on the power strip, my mac immediately turned on!! Also, I have been having some other run of the mill problems like full on unresponsive system, pinwheel showing crashes / freezes while using safari, pro-tools le, and quicktime. This maybe two seperate problems, Im thinking the crashes maybe a bad ram stick, but the mysterious power on seems like a serious hardware issue. Anybody have any suggestions for a skeptical recent mac convert???????

[sinclair_tm]

have you made sure that the energy saver pref pane isn't set up to restart the mac after a power failure, and to automatically start the computer at certain times a day? that would be my first guess.
as far as the pinwheels, did you do a fresh install of the os and apps when you got the mac? alot of time the slowdowns and crashes on used macs are from poor "house keeping" of the prior owner, and there may be so much incompatible stuff installed.

[J. Morgan]

The restart after power failure was checked, as well as a scheduled start @ 12:00. I unchecked those options and think that will do the trick. As for good housekeeping, Im not really sure of how to properly maintaine the mac. I have repaired and verified the permissions in the past, other that that Im clueless??????? Thanks for your help, any further suggestions would be very much appreciated.

[sinclair_tm]

i'd download this, and run it. have it clean up your caches, logs and the such. when those files get huge, they slow things down.