iMac freezes

Hi all,

I've suffered with 'iMac freeze' on my 24" iMac, 2.93 GHz running 10.6.7 for a fair while. I've pretty much tried everything mentioned here and then some. The only thing left to try was taking it in for investigation and possible (expensive) repair.

Just before I did I bought some Crucial RAM, upgrading the original Apple supplied 4GB to 8GB and, as yet, smooth as silk. I may be slightly presumptuous as it could sometimes go days if not weeks without freezing up but after 3 days of using iMac constantly doing intensive graphic tasks, running umpteen progs at once it's still standing!

Will report back after a couple of weeks or so either way. Fingers crossed!!

Apologies if this has been mentioned previously in this discussion but I had a good look and couldn't find reference.

Andy

Hi All.

I'm reading this thread out of sheer frustration.

I have an iMac 21.5 3.06 GHz i3 with 12GB ram, 500MB internal and 1GB external. Second 24" monitor and that's it.

Migrated my user from a PowerMac G5 running Tiger.

About 5 or 6 weeks ago (from the date of this post) it started freezing. Same as described in many posts on this thread: cursor freeze, sound corruption and then no activity. Only a hard reset powers down. No Kernel panic, no nothing.

Today's crash was while browsing in Safari. I was reading a page and only had Entourage running (for email) and a few apps open but not active.

I've been working with AppleCare for about a month now to try and get to the bottom of the problem. They have been very helpful and made many suggestions. However, the iMac continues to freeze and there is no clear pattern to it. At first I thought it might be my external HD as I used this as a boot volume. I have since disconnected it, attached a different drive and now boot from the internal HD. Apple want me to start from scratch with the system and reinstall everything – yep, the lot!!! I estimate this will be a three to four day process to get the machine back to where it was. Not an option as this is my production computer and I need it to work on everyday.

I am totally convinced it is a hardware issue as UNIX operating systems just don't crash like this. I used my first Mac 128K in 1984 and have used them ever since, even running networks of them. OS9 crashed and OSX sometimes got upset but I've never seen anything like this.

I purchased it from a reputable UK online vendor and they will not replace it. So now I'm stuck with a Mac that crashes everyday. The crashes started out just occasionally, maybe once in two weeks. It's getting worse and worse.

So now I'm thinking of reporting the iMac as unfit for purpose to my credit card company. I can't see any other way to get a replacement computer.

Anyway, that's my experience.

Hi air-ship,

I know, a major pain in the rear! I feel your pain, I really do. Apple suggested I do the same, which again for me was a big no no as like you, i need to use it constantly.

Apologies if you've tried new memory or indeed swapping about the dimm's you've got to see if there is a rogue but 6 days on and mine is behaving itself!! I'm beginning to think I've cracked it?

Will report back in another week or so.

Andy

Hi Andy,

Funnily enough, the very helpful lady at Apple suggested removing the additional RAM I have installed. So I'll drop it back to the 4GB that came as factory standard and give it a go.

I've also been asked to remove any third party browser extensions. That's a pain but again I'm happy to try it even though I need them.

Then I have to run the extended hardware test (about an hour).

Apple have offered to pick the iMac up and run additional diagnostics on it but that's not an option for me. I need it to earn a living... No Mac, no wages. Also, I'm not even sure how it would take and I have work on it for clients with whom I have confidentiality agreements.

I'm absolutely convinced it's hardware and it points to graphics or motherboard. But, if the RAM is to blame then I can live with that. I do need at least 8GB to be productive.

I'll post on here with my findings in a day or two.

TTFN.

I'm inclined to agree with you on the hardware as I literally tried everything except a complete re-install.

Look forward to your findings.

Good luck!

Andy

Something I didn't add in my original post was this:

At Apple's request, I totally re-installed Snow Leopard and then migrated my user again. This was exactly the same process I followed when I set the iMac up for the first time.

I then carried out a software update taking it up to 10.6.7 including other Apple updates.

To add insult to injury myself and my mates are also on replacement iPhones that constantly crashed. My mate is on his third 3GS and now runs only core Apple apps on it. He cannot install anything else, if he does, it just crashes during calls. Forget about GPS apps. I will not update my iPhone iOS as I have no faith in the update. Will it or won't it crash.

I never had these kind of problems between 2001 and early 2011 prior to Snow Leopard and the latest generation of iMacs!

I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro that is about 4 years old, on 10.6.7 and is rebooted about once a month!

Hello Ghozer

I see that this post originated in 2010… I wonder why some of you are still hanging out here with such an old post, next time consider a new post but anyway, I guess this goes out to whom it concerns in this post. I apologize in advance for not knowing who to direct the answer to, there are simply too many piggyback riders here. In the future consider your on exclusive posts to get more personalized responses. As such I will leave general guidelines only. Sorry.

Firstly , the symptoms you report are indeed intermittent in nature as they appear to follow no pattern.

Just to repeat, here is what you reported, once or twice a week your iMac 2010 (i5) allegedly freezes forcing you hold the power button and power back up as a resolution. Additionally you reported the machine as 'scorching hot'. Lastly, you report the machine exhibiting the freeze after a period of inactivity.

Couple of things here, what does the freeze look like? Does the time displayed in the upper right continue to show the time? Sorry the post is long and I've not taken complete notes but if I am not mistaken you object to seeing a spinning beach ball or state that this is not what you are reporting but does the spinning beach ball ever exhibit itself and when and for which apps?

In regards to the heat issue, is it so hot that you can not maintain keeping your hand in contact with that part of the computer for nay length of time past a few seconds? If the machine gets so hot that you can not comfortably leave your hand it's not necessarily an issue but that depends on reports you make here about the apps running on your mac. Activity monitor can also help you determine how much load each app places on the CPU, the more CPU use, disc burning (doubt burning discs is the issue you are having), the more HD use, the more heat. A runaway application (an app that has essentially 'lost it's marbles' can be hogging the CPU, causing heat issues) — note that article's basis is to demonstrate how it can drain a battery on a portable but should provide you insight.

Heat can in general be a normal thing (unless it actually literally burns your hand) and the mac does have very silent fans that are managed by the System Management Controller which is measures heat via sensors and in turn increases or lowers RPM speed on fans attached to each component that can have a bearing on heat. Unless the SMC has incorrect, aka corrupted settings, it's thresholds that govern fan RMPs based on temperature readings are not at their defaults you can see heat issues. Despite this, the mac does have safety mechanisms to shutdown the machine if too much heat is sensed. It will shutdown of it's own accord should these maximum thresholds by violated. You can reset the SMC to return otherwise corrupt settings to normal. This should be done to rule out this possibility. If issues persist it could be other hardware still. I'll outline what I think shortly. Absolutely make sure that your environment is not hot to begin with.

On to freezes next. If you get a chance please come back and describe in more detail the freezes. The term freeze might mean different things to different people, try to add detail if possible.

Freezes and hardware and software. When troubleshooting you need to consider hardware AND software as mutually exclusive. Your hardware is static, it will remain the same as it did out of the box unless you deliberately make changes. Those changes can mean RAM you add after the purchase; RAM not included in the order with Apple. Please do remove all 3rd party RAM from your system to exclude that possibility as the root cause of your woes. Other hardware changes you can make, include any and all devices attached to the computer's ports, remove any and all hardware connected to the mac. Bring the hardware configuration back to how it arrived to you. Do this in an effort to isolate the issue. Report back with all hardware changes you've made; RAM, printers, USB devices, Firewire devices, etc. Remove them.

Software is similar to hardware, you can plug more software into your mac but it's endlessly more flexible. Your mac is a chameleon, it can even turn into a Windows machine or a Linux box so software is extremely flexible. Hardware, without any exclusion of the 3rd party components, must be healthy or you can easily see issues, those issues that you report in your first post on this thread. Consider software, what have you installed since purchasing your mac?

To be blunt as absolutely helpful I can be, get hardware to how it came to you out of the box first because it is the easiest but I am not sure how disruptive it will be but an Apple Authourised Service Provider (AASP) will not troubleshoot your mac with your added RAM (if any) nor your peripherals and cables — only the mac itself because that is what they service.

You can only get one of two results if you follow this hardware isolation advice, the issue will either disappear or not. If not, then begin adding hardware back one at a time until you find the culprit and report back at that stage noting what you found, it might supporting software that is faulty, examine cables in use if any, RAM has neither. If the issue persists after isolating hardware then consider the other layer of a computer, software. Very important, don't return complexity by adding hardware back yet until you isolate software as well.

Troubleshooting is about reducing complexity to isolate an issue to a component.

In terms of software do not hesitate to create a new partition on your hard drive, install a fresh clean install of Mac OS X and run all the software updates and now test by booting into that partition. Your hardware and software are now as they were out of the box. If the issue takes 1 week to show its ugly face then test for at least one week.

After the week, as in my example begin to install the software that you absolutely need first and nothing else, forget any other crazy do-dad that you believe helps optimize your mac etc. Your mac is a screamer by virtue of its specs and brilliant lean mean OS.

Slowly start to add more software.

In terms of restoring your personal files I can help you with that later. If you agree with this you can save yourself a lot of frustration and further cries to the discussions forum, I know that it can be painful but you will find the cause.

If you take your machine to an AASP and they find no trouble, there will be no parts for them to repair your mac with and you may have to pay them a diagnostics fee, with AppleCare, in warranty or not. Warranties and AppleCare protects you against hardware not software/hardware diagnostics unless your machine has a confirmed hardware issue.

You ran Disk Utility and it found nothing wrong, good start. You ran some third party tools and those found nothing, good.

I sincerely hope that you consider some of these steps but more importantly they help you resolve this issue.

Don't hesitate to come back and post any and all additional information or queries that you might have.

Best Regards

PS forgive the long post and any grammar errors.

Airship are you the one who needs help here? Confused about who to help. Tell your iPhone mates to consider installing apps but as a rule to remember, some non-Apple apps can cause issues, there is no guarantee. Kind of hard to believe that they can't install any apps or the phone crashes. Doesn't sound plausible but that's for another post.

"I estimate this will be a three to four day process to get the machine back to where it was." How did you come to this reckoning?

Not true, you can very easily migrate an entire user account from one mac to any other mac, even manually it's cake, move the said user account folder to /Users, create a new user account in the accounts system preferences and when creating the account use the exact same name as the user account folder you just moved and consider the same password. OSX will warn you that the user account folder already exists and if you would like to use it as the home folder just agree, voila, all data migrated manually. Cake. It does not take 3 or 4 days to do that.

"Not an option as this is my production computer and I need it to work on everyday."

We all buy computers for work, most of us do on the mac side but each day you resist finding the solution because of the statement you made below is lost time. It's not true that UNIX will not 'crash', it can, it's software, software can be in conflict, or there could be bad hardware. You mentioned Apple suggesting you remove 3rd party RAM. Do remove it as hardware is the easiest of all to return to an out of the box configuration. Remove 3rd party RAM and any all peripherals and cables. Cables can be faulty, hardware drivers can be faulty as well making it appear as though things are hardware related. Software being infinitely more malleable than hardware can, when issues appear, make for the appearance of a hardware issue.

"I am totally convinced it is a hardware issue as UNIX operating systems just don't crash like this."

You also said

"Apple have offered to pick the iMac up and run additional diagnostics on it but that's not an option for me. I need it to earn a living... No Mac, no wages. Also, I'm not even sure how it would take and I have work on it for clients with whom I have confidentiality agreements."

If you are concerned about privacy (confidentiality) then use filevault. I am sure the last thing a service provider has time or interest for anyway is to look at customer data but there is nothing wrong with showing concern so click on the link to learn about filevault and use it. More likely than a service provider jeopardizing your documents are a lost or stolen computer with data as important as you allege to having.

"The crashes started out just occasionally, maybe once in two weeks. It's getting worse and worse. So now I'm thinking of reporting the iMac as unfit for purpose to my credit card company. I can't see any other way to get a replacement computer."

Look at this way, you need to solve your issue and anyone can understand that, please consider reading the long post I left below. I would be willing to try my own medicine if I were in your shoes - really. In summary if a clean up-to-date OS and hardware as it came out of the box to your from Apple continue exhibiting the same symptoms then it's definitely hardware and that would be the domain and expertise of a service provider.

You declined the offer Apple made to have the machine picked? At the moment I certainly can't verify that your machine is facing hardware issues, we are only discussing it but if there is indeed a hardware issue, you will need to take your mac in for service. Reason tells me that you should have declined the offer, they are after all only trying to accommodate and help as much as possible. I would be very happy with that offer because it would mean you stop doing all this testing and let the pros handle it. If no issues are found after their evaluation, you then have only to consider the hardware you attach to the machine at present, which you can already do — simply unplug all devices to test hardware, all cables, all devices, all 3rd party internal components you added (RAM). If issues persist, get your OS back to factory settings, as per your install discs, run updates and test again without hardware. If issues persist, then it's safe to say it's hardware.

I urge you to consider reading my other long post here.

A courteous note to all:

I only post the facts according to my experiences and those whom I trust and share their findings with me.

I owned my first Mac in 1987 and have personally owned over 10 Macs since then, even building Macs from spare parts when I was poor and Macs were very expensive (but that's another story).

There is no hijacking of threads and that just aint plain nice to suggest so.

So back to the iPhone. My mate (not a made up one, he's real) was advised to keep his iPhone free of third party apps. What can I tell you. If you're in the UK then did you watch TV tonight. Yet again Apple was slated for their seriously bad attitude when it comes to denying all knowledge and aiming the blame elsewhere. I have used, purchased (at corporate level) and recommended Apple for nearly thirty years. My wife and I both agreed that we no longer have the confidence we once had in "bullet proof" Apple computers and software. Enough said.

With all respect, please don't tell me how long it will take to rebuild my production Mac from scratch. Apple want me to stop migrating and install everything from scratch. That's 30 plus apps, thousands of fonts, countless utils and other stuff I haven't even though of yet (which is the stuff you often don't account for).

So they are asking me to ditch my long term user account and start a new one on a freshly installed operating system. No migration assistant here my friend.

Have you met my clients? Do you have first hand knowledge of my business activities? Please don't speculate about this.

Downtime. Well, I guess I could ditch this Mac and sell it on Ebay and go back to my old PowerMac. That would require some work and many applications that will not run on Tiger. Ever installed Leopard on a PowerMac? It's the worst experiment I ever did. It was so slow and clunky that I went straight back to Tiger.

I take your point about a clean, fresh, out-of-the-box install is the way to go. But how, on this earth am I meant to get any work done with no Adobe and no Microsoft suite (all my clients use it unfortunately).

You may or may not have intended to rattle my cage. This is not a joke I assure you. I've gone from a reliable tool to a tool that I cannot trust nor predict whether it will or will not work. I'm sure you take my point.

I thought the idea here was to help others solve problems, not create new ones.

Oh, and some final thoughts. Apple now want me to look at the RAM and other third party browser extensions. Again, I need to push this point home: what is the point of having a computer that you can't run third party software on? Do the new generation of iMacs accept more than 4MB of RAM? Should we just use them straight out of the box with no other apps installed, even though Apple built the App Store into Snow Leopard?

Hello Air ship

I apologise for any misunderstanding. My intention is to help you of course.

I will do my best to go through your concerns:

If possible minimise software as an isolation step, this will help understand if software is the culprit. Make sure all your software, Apple and 3rd party are up to date. With respect to 3rd party software (plugins, extension try to find out if they meet the system requirements)

Fonts can cause issues so turn only those that you need for your work on using Fontbook or whichever 3rd party font manager you are using and make sure those fonts are not corrupt as it can cause issues.

The effort of considering your user account is an isolation step, in other words, if the same symptoms are not exhibited in a 'test' user account then the issue would stem from somewhere inside your main user account.

In terms of an out-of-box configuration; it's clear that you need further software than what was supplied by Apple, consider installing a few at a time or only those that you absolutely need. Again, make sure those apps fall within the system requirements of the mac hardware/software. Plugins can cause issues if they are outdated so do consider any 'add-ons' to those 3rd party apps as well.

Looking at RAM can be an issue if faulty. RAM is hardware of course but removing any 3rd party RAM will help pinpoint the foundation on which software lives, this is why hardware considerations should be made first because it can be the least disruptive, perhaps in your case it may be more so the case considering that you have a lot of software on your system.

Hope this helps and I apologise for any misunderstanding. I am here to help people or I would not be here. This is my time too. I hope it's appreciated.

Kind regards

Yep, all your advice is logical and pertinent.

All I can tell you is that I have spent the day removing RAM, third party extensions and creating a clone of my hard drive (I also have a Time Machine).

So far I've managed to backup my internal hard drive. I couldn't do this successfully when the additional RAM was installed.

I appreciate any help offered and presently I'm working with Apple to quarantine the problem. I really do hope it's RAM. Thing is, I performed an extended and standard hardware test and there were no RAM errors. I can limp along with 4GB of RAM for the time being.

I'll keep this thread updated.

Airship

I am to learn that you are making some progress. It should be noted that the Apple Hardware Test, labelled AHT on one of your install discs is not a catch all, some things can slip past it.

The fact that removing RAM has resulted in an up to now, unsuccessful backup could be indicative of RAM but we shall see what other symptoms remain and depending on what those are, other relevant steps may apply, not precluding what was mentioned beforehand.

PS, the reference to highjacking should be cleared up as I used that term. It was a reference to, ideally staying away from jumping in a thread indicating a 'me too' scenario. Preferably in the future and respectfully, the forum is generally kept more organized if folks leave their own new thread for their own issue. The simple reasoning behind this is generally that your issue, although symptomatically the same may differ once more details are gathered about software version(s), any behavioral patterns noted that may differ, generation of mac in reference, attached hardware, and other details that may relevantly apply. You committed no sin obviously but understandably you took objection to the term 'highjack' — my apologies if that was the case.

Keep us posted, I will keep my eye on the thread and provide you further steps if asked.

Take care…

Air-ship

What model mac do you have? You can find the specs for your machine including the RAM specs here.

I am anticipating a RAM issue so if needed the link might be useful.

Regards