I think my computer is dying

[pillowhead]

Ok, so here's the haps.

I have an old G4 Sawtooth that I've been through hell and back with.
It's killed 2 mobos since I bought it and I'm on the my 3rd.

I've also upgraded the hell out of it, so there are quite a few 3rd party parts in there.

Typically she works like a charm. I've not had any problem doig pretty much anything on it for a while.

Lately however, I've had alot of problems installing and with apps in general.

Heres' the specs.

1ghz Powerlogix cpu
1.12 gb of RAM
2 120's gb HD's
128 MB ATI Radeon 9000
Pioneer DVD-R drive

Also have a FW800 card that I installed but I took out to see if it was causing issues.

So, I've had a horrible time trying to get anything to install. Tiger simply will not install at all. I get errors on every install. I've reformatted the drive, zeroed it out. I've run TTP4 to check the hardware, which all passed.

The thing is that I've had problems installing on FW drives too, they give me errors on install as well. I've also had no luck installing games like WoW, having only gotten it to install once after a hell of a time, and anytime there is an update it wont install correctly.

I've been getting verification errors with Disc Images, and apps like FireFox crashing.

All in all, I think there's something wrong with my hardware, but I'm not sure what. TTP4 says everything is cool, is there another diagnositic I can try?

Does this sound like anything in particular?
I'm thinking that its either a mobo problem or a bad Ram stick..but maybe I'm wrong. Does anyone know how the Apple Techs test hardware??

I'm replacing this machine soon, but I want to keep it for other things. I do love it although it's been the bane of my existance lately

Can someone please give me some advice??

 

[riccbhard]

I'm thinking bad ram or hard drive problem. Possibly one of the 3rd party 'items' messing up. Typical to happen to 3rd party things.

Killed 2 mobos?
I'd make sure the power supply is working correctly. They can start to mess up over time, espcially switching power supplies.

 

[nixgeek]

I mentioned this one time before, and I'm not sure it's with these G4 systems, but here it is.

There was an issue with the power mechanism on some older G4 systems. They had a tendency to render the system useless and the only fix for it was replacing the power supply and the mechanism itself...something about the power mechanism shorting out or something. It happened to a bunch of G4s that was bought at my last job for a computer lab. It was intermittent, so as they went we had to call Apple to fix them.

Again, this might not be the issue with your system, but something to consider.

 

[riccbhard]

nixgeek, that's just about what I was going to say. I remember somewhere hearing about the same problem.