frequent crashes, dock prefs not working

Y

yellowave

Registered
I have an 800 MHz G4, running OS X 10.4.11. A few years ago, the machine totally crashed, and destroyed one hard drive; a second (internal) was still salvageable.

Now I'm experiencing problems again. Applications crash at random, I can never quit Quark, with out getting the "Application unexpectdly quit" message, everythig slows down to a painful speed, where I can't even type anymore, without having to wait for the letters to show up on the screen, and the latest weirdness is that the dock wouldn't show up anymore when I went to that side of the monitor. I put it on "always on", and now I can't even change any of the dock preferences anymore.

Sometimes the machine freezes, and while I can move the mouse on the screen, it will not activate anything, and the Force Quit key command won't work on any program.

I used DiskWarrior with succes, but the effect only lasts for a while. And after every repair with DiskWarrior the problem free periods get shorter. I verify/repair the permissions often, and use the Janitor occassionally. None of those have helped so far.

The fan seems to run louder than it used to. Sometimes when I put the machine to sleep, the fan doesn't stop running.

I also tried to minimize the fonts that are active, to no effect.
 
How much empty space do you have? If the empty space is less than 15 % of the hard drive, this kind of thing can start to happen (as the cause #1)
 
This is what is stated in the system profiler:
Capacity: 279.33 GB
Available: 219.14 GB
I should be fine on that matter. Any other ideas?
Thanks,
Yellowave
 
This is what is stated in the system profiler:
Capacity: 279.33 GB
Available: 219.14 GB
I should be fine on that matter. Any other ideas?
Thanks so much,
Yellowave
 
You may want to archive and install, as this will show if you have a hardware or software issue. Also, what is the exact model of your mac? I don't recall what 800 MHz PowerMac could support drives over 128 GB - or what are you using to support it?
 
The exact model? All I can find is Power Mac G4. I didn't know I needed to support a harddrive bigger than 128 GB. Any suggestions?
 
the model: I tried to figure out which one I have on this page: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58418
From the picture, it looks like I have the Digital Audio Version. However, I don't have a DVD drive, neither do I have an L3 Cache, although I do have 133 MHz bus speed. The system profiler states the following:
Machine Model: PowerMac3,5
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (2.1)
 
I think that was one of the first to support "big drives".

Do you have any PCI cards installed? An archive and install would be helpful to isolate the problem. If you have a spare hard drive, you could test a clean install on that.
 
That mac supports "big drives" as well, however, this one doesn't:
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/stats/powermac_g4_800_dp_qs.html

This kind of flakiness could be caused by lack of big-drive support. Otherwise, I'd recommend an Archive and Install. It'd probably be faster than trying to figure out what part of the system is broken - and it does look like some critical parts of the system are breaking.

If you can't support big drives, you can get an IDE card to support them, but i'd recommend getting a drive under 120 GB for the system. Also, I would get the Acard card, I am having trouble with SIIG's card (OS 9 drivers, etc).
 
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No, that's definitely not it. I'm pretty sure the one I linked is correct: I copied the "M8705LL/A" from the System Profiler, and every info I find on the site corresponds with my machine. The one you referenced has a SuperDrive, and I can't even read DVDs.
Thanks again; I'll try the Archive and Install.
 
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