I was thinking of buying a new iMac in October when they have Leopard out, but I'm reading a lot of posts where some of the iMacs are freezing up, and the only way to "unfreeze" them is to use the power button and turn it off. I was just wondering if there are a lot of iMacs users that are still experiencing this, or has this been resolved?
Given that your problems are associated with 3D gaming, you may well be experiencing driver issues. I've read elsewhere on these forums that the drivers for ATI 2600 remain fairly buggy - for Windows as well as MacOS X. This is not any immediate consolation for you, I know, but at least it is something that can be fixed in a software update... Have you looked in the system logs to see whether there are any clues to the source of crashes? You might also want to use a utility to monitor the system temperatures and see whether there is any relationship.
Sounds dead. Have you tried booting off the DVD to run the systems diagnostic (hold down C whilst booting)? If that fails as well, then your machine is almost certainly fried. I'd get on the phone to Apple.
I just purchased my new imac onliine less than a week ago...how can you tell which hard drive model you have? How do you know it is a Sea....?? I looked it up in the system profiler and mine just says model # WDCWD50000AAKS-......Intel is the vendor. I am concerned about the stability of the imac now...mine is working so great, it is too good to be true compared to a pc...knock on wood.
I also suspect a problem w/ the gfx driver. I issued a bug report related to this problem, and I hope all of you who experience the same problem do it was well!
For the moment I test the machine w/o Quartz Extreme, will see whether this helps or not...
I wish I had done a search before buying. I just bought my 24" iMac last Saturday. I have owned a mac since 1997 and never had this problem. It is freezing up when I go to iTunes TV section (to browse or buy TV shows). It did it the first night I bought it and it just did it twice in a row. Does anyone know what the issues are? THis is clearly NOT related to the 500GB Seagate drive, as I have the 320 HD in my brand new 24" iMac. This bites. Apple needs to do something about this. I hate to have to take my computer back, but I spent a lot of money (cash) on this.
I have done multiple searches since posting this and this is now a known issue. It is all over the forums, with one user claiming to have duplicated the freeze in all new iMacs on display at both Apple Stores and local electronics stores that sell apples. This is really bad, IMO. I mean, I paid a lot of money for this computer and it shouldn't do this. This is something that should be caught in Beta-Testing. Apple needs to fix the problem or recall all of these computers.
WOW!!! Thanks so much for everyone's responses. I'm kind of at a loss for words now. I currently have an eMachine that I bought at Wal-Mart, and I'm not having any issues with it so far, other than it being kind of slow, but I think that that's related to it only having 512 MB of RAM. It does sometimes have issues where I'll get a "McAfee Proxy Service had to close" message that pops up. I think that has to do with something on McAfee not being compatible with Windows Vista. I do love the looks of the iMacs and just fell in love with the white one that I had the earlier part of the year. I hated it so badly when I had to send it back because of my situation with the updates. When I found out that I could get the Wireless Broadband where I live, I was really, really looking forward to getting the new Aluminum iMac, but with all of the problems that I'm seeing, I don't really know what to do now. From what I have read, it's not just the "freezing" with the iMacs that concerns me, but it seems that most everyone with the 20" screens are having "washed out" issues. Some of them are having to either purchase the 24" iMacs, or just learn to live with the issue. Then there are some with the 24" iMacs that are having trouble with the screen being bright in the left hand corner and then dark in the right corner. They are also having some other issues with the color on the 24" screens. After seeing all of this, I'm really going to have to reconsider this. I know that every company has problems of some sort with their machines, and I also understand that with reading this message board that I'm going to mostly see people that are having issues with their iMacs, but my thinking on it is this.......if their was only 1 or 2 on here that had screen problems with their iMacs, or "freezing" problems, I would just say that they got a bad machine. But, when you keep reading about the issues that people are having, it makes me think that there may be some definite issues with the new iMacs, and I really do hate that because they are such beautiful machines. Thanks for sharing your experiences with your iMacs, and I wish all of you good luck with getting your issues resolved.
The freezing is bad, without a question. But nevertheless the new 24" iMacs are gorgeous!
Moreover, I believe the UI freezing is simply a graphics driver issue which can be fixed. And I am sure Apple is aware of this problem and working hard to provide a fix (I at least issued a bug report, and I hope I am not the only one who did so). In any case I had no such incident anymore since I disabled Quartz Extreme...
I purchased a new 20” iMac Intel Core 2 Duo, having made the big switch to a Mac after having been a die-hard PC user. The thing that I was most interested in is the factor of stability and avoiding the endless crashes of my computer while doing my daily work.
I was quite surprised to find that my new iMac crashes more than my PC did! I seem to be doing very normal tasks (using iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie) and either the entire system freezes or just the application which I’m using. I sure hope that Apple intervenes soon.
No, I have a 320 GB hard drive.
In looking at other discussions, I wonder if it has something to do with a conflict with iTunes. See:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1095847 However, mine has also crashed with other iLife applications (maybe iTunes is still the cause, doing something in the background. I’m not sure). In any case it’s pretty frustrating. My new iMac is really fantastic and I’m optimistic that a fix will be found. I just hope it’s sooner rather than later. 😉
This does not work, you can't open the Force Quit Applications panel anymore once this happens. You cannot even kill the Finder or other applications from the shell when logging in via SSH.
