EMAC Freezing

A

alyraqs

Registered
Sometime ago, I installed MAC OSX Tiger 10.4 onto my E Mac (CPU Power PC G4.1.1). It functioned OK for a couple of years, but then began freezing.
We tried to re-install the OSX system from an external DVD drive and although it registered the Install DVD, it would never boot from it. Eventually, we used my son's Mac laptop as a slave and reinstalled.
Unfortunately, the computer still freezes randomly. It seems worse when pulling things from the dock (eg: Word files, Firefox etc.) or when pull down menus appear.
My son thinks the computer has "had it".
Can you help?
 
How much RAM do you have?
How big HD and is at least 15 % of the HD empty?
When it seems to freeze, open Console (/Applications/Utilities) and post what gets generated in console.
 
You may have one of the infamous bad eMac capacitors. This was a real problem a few years ago. In fact, it affected my eMac. Luckily, at the time, Apple replaced my logic board for free. Unfortunately, the free repair offer has expired.

Do a Google search for "emac freeze logic board" and/or "emac bad capacitor", or a combination of all these words. You will get thousands of hits.

Here's a thread I started at the Apple forums a few years ago.
 
Many thanks for the replies. Having done some research since posting, it would seem likely that the cause is capacitors as the freezing is getting worse.
The console came up with the following after the last freeze. As I'm not a computer expert, I'm not sure it means anything:
Mac OS X Version 10.4.11 (Build 8S165)
2009-01-13 15:54:39 +0000
2009-01-13 15:54:41.651 SystemUIServer[129] lang is:en

The HD has about 75% empty and I had the RAM checked with one of those free programmes you can download and that came back as 256 and working OK.

I'm taking the panel underneath off tomorrow to have a look at the capacitors. I'm reluctant to ditch the machine as my needs are pretty basic, but...
 
Hope you can resolve your eMac problem.

Whether or not you've got the bad capacitors, 256 MB is a terribly small amount of RAM to run OS X. Any Mac would be dog-slow with so little.

I'd recommend at least 512 MB, one GB if you could swing it.

And you don't need any special program to find out haw much RAM you have, just go to the Apple menu and select About This Mac.

Good luck with your eMac!
 
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