joshlindell
Registered
I have an Intel iMac (silver) 20" with 250gb hd, ATI 256mb graphics, 1 gig of RAM and all recent updates from Apple. I bought it about two years ago refurbished from Apple. It's been running with almost no problems till yesterday. I left the Sims 3 running on the sim creation screen for a few hours while I was outside. When I came back in, the computer was frozen. Command/option/esc didn't work, so I shut down with the power button. Upon restart OS X loaded, but was running extremely sluggish, then froze again in a few minutes. Throughout the next few hours I continued restarting, the freezing occurring earlier and earlier in the start-up process, until it would freeze on the grey screen right after the start-up "chime." I let it sit unplugged overnight (8 hours) and this morning it started up into OS X alright, I was able to open World of Warcraft, Safari, and then began moving movie files into the trash, trying to clear some space on the hard drive. Hard drive was down to only 23 gig free, so I thought clearing some space couldn't hurt anything. This all took about 15 minutes and the computer slowed way up again, taking 2-3 minutes of having the spinning cursor wheel when moving a file from movies to trash. Shortly after it froze again and I shut down and unplugged for another hour. Started it up again and emptied trash, clearing 40 gig, opened and logged in to World of Warcraft again, was able to be online a few minutes, then after logging out and logging into another character, the computer froze on the loading screen. Again, command/option/esc didn't work, so I shut down again.
I saw advice to another poster here having a similar type problem to download MacOSXCombo 10.5.7 update, and am doing that currently on this computer and will try to install via usb drive on the other one in case it's a corrupt graphics file.
One other puzzling thing is I used the OS X discs to boot up, and when I went to do a fresh install of OS X, on the window asking which volume to install OS X on, I had no options, as if the installer couldn't find the hard drive. I ran the hardware test from the CD and it said there were no problems detected.
Any help would be appreciated, as the computer is not under Apple's warranty anymore, and I really don't want to pay $250 to send it in only to have them say I should just buy a new machine.
I saw advice to another poster here having a similar type problem to download MacOSXCombo 10.5.7 update, and am doing that currently on this computer and will try to install via usb drive on the other one in case it's a corrupt graphics file.
One other puzzling thing is I used the OS X discs to boot up, and when I went to do a fresh install of OS X, on the window asking which volume to install OS X on, I had no options, as if the installer couldn't find the hard drive. I ran the hardware test from the CD and it said there were no problems detected.
Any help would be appreciated, as the computer is not under Apple's warranty anymore, and I really don't want to pay $250 to send it in only to have them say I should just buy a new machine.