Freaky graphics and freezing...

[NotSupplied]

Hi there. We're running an imac g4, 700 Mhz, 768 Mb Ram with OSX 10.3.9.

We have been having a problem with freezing/crashes for a long time, accompanied by distorted graphics and have been unable to get to the bottom of it. A screenshot of what happens is linked below.

The pattern is that we will start working on something, then the graphics will become distorted in a small area. Then sometimes we'll get away with working for a bit longer, or sometimes it goes wrong right away. The graphics distortion spreads, and either the computer freezes and has to be restarted or we get the grey error box saying to restart.

We've tried:

• adding more ram - it still crashes even with simple apps.
• using macaroni to schedule maintenance tasks
• unplugging hardware to see if there's a conflict

Have also tried clearing the PRAM on reboot, which seems to increase the chance of it working for a while.

As you can tell, I don't know much about MacOS any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[Giaguara]

Hi Joshua,

That looks like bad RAM or bad graphics when they heat up.
Freezes, applications crashing, bad graphics... try with new or known good RAM. That is in > 98 % the RAM that is causing that.
Apple Hardware Test in loop mode or memtest can be run too if you need a confirm for diagnosis but you would need to run the memory tests at least a few hours.

 

[NotSupplied]

Thanks a lot for that. I'll give the tests a try.