eMac freezes randomly, open window turns into broken up jibber

My current home eMac was bought from the Apple Store in Boca Raton in August 2004. Basically mine is about a month or so younger than yours. It does not have freezing/jibbering problems.

My home machine shipped with 80GB disk, Superdrive, and 256MB RAM. The first thing I did was to upgrade it to 512. Shortly afterwards I got a Windows box which shipped with 256; I got a 512 stick for the Mac, raising it to 768, and put one of the 256s into the Windows box. A bit later I got another 512, and put the other 256 into the Windows box while the eMac went to 1024. When I got my two 1GB sticks a few weeks back the two 512s went to the Windows box, displacing two 256s which are now paperweights, and the eMac has 2GB. If I can figure a way to get the eMac to take 2GB sticks, the 1GB sticks will head for the Windows box, displacing the 256 and one 512... The home eMac also has several external FireWire drives (usually a Seagate and two LaCies, occasionally a Maxtor in a no-name case and a DVD-ROM, also in a no-name case, taken from a graphite G4 when I put a DVD-RW into it, and a FireWire hub) attached, plus a USB hub for my assorted USB toys (Bluetooth, thumb drive, that kind of thing) and I put an AirPort Extreme card into it. Yeah, I've messed with this boy fairly heavily.

I'd yanked the 40GB drive out of my old, original, 700MHz eMac and replaced it with a 120, but the 80GB in the newer one is good enough for now. Maybe if Hitachi drops the price on their 300GB drives a touch more I'll grab one and replace the 80 with it. And put the 80 into the Windows box, of course, there's space in there for two more drives in addition to the two optical and two hard drives I already have installed. You can never have too much disk space. If I hadn't sold the old eMac I'd probably have pulled the CD-RW it came with and replaced it with a DVD-RW by this time. That, or I'd have got an external DVD-RW. Or, possibly, both.

I purchased my eMac from the Apple Store in Boca Raton in Sept 2004. My problems continue to get worse with each passing day. The only upgrade I made to the hardware was adding RAM about 6 months ago and everything was running great until several weeks ago. So without the Apple Care warranty, I don't think it will be cost effective for me to put a lot of money into the machine. Therefore, it's the new iMac for me .... with the warranty.

eMac 1.25GHz Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Looks like it was the motherboard...now I am trading it in for a new imac.

Hi
Everybody seems to be giving up and replacing there emacs. Does no one else think that this due date of 1 1/2 years on all of our computers is a little short. My IBook had glitches from the start and eventually mac replaced the logic board for free. The emac also had some disturbing glitches from the start, though I assumed- wrongly- that they were normal and okay. Surely it is not right for Mac to allow all our machines to die like this and not cover us. This is not a problem we caused or are responsible for. I consider the warrenty for people who are unable to fix there own mac- who are not mac savy and need the support- or for minor mac trouble- not for the complete destruction of our machines- this is unheard of. I have a Mac LC520 that still works- but a new Emac that doesn't. If it were just me, you kind of just have to say oh well- but its not- its a bunch of us and probably many more. Even you Charles- my machine was working fine a month ago- your machine could be next- who knows. Does no one else think that Mac needs to look into this issue? I have put huge amounts of faith into Mac for many years as I'm sure we all have and I am massively dissapointed in this situation- I just want to know if anyone else feels the same. Should Mac be looking into this issue?!

Hi
Everybody seems to be giving up and replacing
there emacs.

Not everyone. Most of us have no problems.

Does no one else think that this due
date of 1 1/2 years on all of our computers is a
little short.

Yes, it would be if this was a general problem. As it's not...

My IBook had glitches from the start
and eventually mac replaced the logic board for
free. The emac also had some disturbing glitches
from the start, though I assumed- wrongly- that they
were normal and okay.

What kind of 'glitches'? Why didn't you have them seen to while it was under warranty?

Surely it is not right for
Mac

The name of the company is 'Apple', not 'Mac'.

to allow all our machines to die like this and
not cover us.

If you think you have a case, make it. We've going to need some hard numbers. For example, at least two people on this thread bought their machines at the Apple Store in Boca Raton in September 2004. One has a problem. One does not. Perhaps if we could have the serial numbers of affected machines we'd have some idea if this is a bad batch of motherboards and which motherboards are likely to be affected.

My machine does NOT have the problem. My serial number is G84330E2QQJ. The boot ROM version is 4.8.2f1. All 1.25GHz eMac (USB2) machines should have a boot ROM number close to or identical to mine. They should also have a serial number something close to mine. You can find it in System Profile.

This is not a problem we caused or
are responsible for.

First you're going to have to demonstrate that this is a general problem. Half-a-dozen trouble reports does not a problem make.

I consider the warrenty for
people who are unable to fix there own mac- who are
not mac savy and need the support- or for minor mac
trouble- not for the complete destruction of our
machines- this is unheard of.

Sigh. Your machine is not 'completely destroyed'. The motherboard has a problem. Maybe.

I have a Mac LC520
that still works- but a new Emac that doesn't. If
it were just me, you kind of just have to say oh
well- but its not- its a bunch of us and probably
many more. Even you Charles- my machine was working
fine a month ago- your machine could be next- who
knows.

I kinda doubt this, but if there's a problem I'll take it to the local Apple Store and see what's wrong. Apple started shipping these machines in April, 2004. A general problem which surfaces after 18 months should have started in December/January and by this time there should be a very large number of failed machines. This does not seem to be the case, unless someone can show me some numbers to support this.

Does no one else think that Mac needs to
look into this issue? I have put huge amounts of
faith into Mac for many years as I'm sure we all
have and I am massively dissapointed in this
situation- I just want to know if anyone else feels
the same. Should Mac be looking into this issue?!

The company's name is 'Apple'. And unless and until someone presents some actual numbers, I suspect that they will not be doing anything.

Hi Charles
By everybody's machines going bad, I am refering to everyone on this board- except for you apparently. By Mac- I am using a familiar term to describe a corporation near and dear to my heart. Honestly I am not sure why you are part of this discussion. I have read a number of people posting and we all feel extremely upset by this occurance, a mac is almost like a pet, it hurts to have your mac hurt, and really hurts to watch it die- you don't have this problem so you can't relate- and if you've had it in the past, you have forgotten. I know others are upset and GBard mentioned 9/38 machines going bad at his school within 2 weeks, which is fairly substantial you must admit. My serial number is G8429BKFQQH, my macine no longer boots so that's the only number I have got. Catherine

emac Mac OS X (10.3.4)

Incidentally Charles, I am not trying to minimize the help you have been providing everyone here. All I'm saying is that now I am speaking from the heart to the other people on the board, and that it doesn't pertain directly to you. Thanks, Catherine

back to the question of dust in the machine. Any feedback?

emac Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Update on my situation with the eMacs. After going back and forth with apple about the nine machines i'm having problems with, they've Ok me to bring one machine at a time to the local mac repair shop to be looked at if needed, fixed. Now all of my machines are out of warranty. but they've managed to allow these nine to be looked at because I have so many (I work for a school system of 13 schools - there's probably over 50 of the same type of eMac's that have the problems). I'll keep ya posted..

i bought my machine in August 2004 and just started having the problem a couple of weeks ago, soon after upgrading to 10.4.4. I deleted all ATI extensions and that seems to have solved the problem.

I am the sole Apple Tech for a major newspaper in Arkansas and I have about 100 1.25Ghz eMac's. I have found 53 of them to have the same problem. The logic board has leaking caps and this is causing all of the problems. I am talking to Apple to see if they will replace the logic board under a REA program or some other type of warranty. Right now, all I can do is replace the logic board out of warranty to correct the random freezeing and locking up.

1.25 Ghz eMac Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Charles!

I was wondering: does your machine have the QuickTime 7.0.4 update installed? The reason I'm asking is because I know that that update broke some stuff like java and my eMac, purchased from the Apple Online Store in July of 04, has never crashed until now. Plus the timing is about right...

On a developers board I found out that the error getting dumped to the system log has to do with OpenGL. Disabling the appropriate ATI extensions makes the problem go away. I was also able to get rid of the video artifacts of the problem by installing an ATI update that came out last month, but the crashing problem persists. It always happens when some GUI animation occurs, like a sheet slurping down from a window title bar (as a print dialog box) or minimizing something in the dock.

This may very well stem from a problem with the Radeon 9200 series chip that's on these logic boards but there is an obvous software component to it that should be able to be fixed.

yours/
peter.

Charles!

I was wondering: does your machine have the QuickTime
7.0.4 update installed?

Yes. I have the second QT 7.0.4 update installed. I'd installed the first, saw the note that there was a problem, uninstalled it with the Apple uninstaller, and then reinstalled the second version.

You might want to kill the 7.0.4 update and then reinstall.

Aha! Something! (Been lurking wishing that something happier than a logic board failure might emerge -- it seemed odd to me that a British eMac would have come from an affected batch evidencing itself in North America, but not impossible. Hardware tests had been fine, same as everyone else, but one crosses one's fingers.)

I downgraded from 10.4.4 to 10.4.3 two days ago in the hopes that it was something in the OS upgrade itself. (I now don't recall whether I then bounced QT up to 7.0.4 in the misbegotten hope of running iLife '06.) The crashes had started getting very, very close together, and very few of them had been ssh-and-shutdown-gracefully types.

The crashes first evidenced themselves whenever watching or listening to streamed media, particularly while bringing the display back on if it decided I'd been idle too long and Energy Saved on me. (Later, drawing dialogues in Photoshop while iTunes was running was enough to kick it over with artifacting, which had me thinking "Ah, some combination of 10.4.4 and new Quicktime?") I had the eMac running various video/audio streams in VLC, a high-bitrate RealPlayer file, and/or a Flash video (just in case it was "redrawing a lot of stuff very quickly" doing it) under 10.4.3 for about a day and a half. It finally fell over hard while just playing an audio stream, just after I hit the spacebar to turn the display back on, an hour ago as I write this.

There was nothing in the logs to indicate a crash had happened. Under 10.4.4, it was ATIRadeon errors all the way.

"Stuck record" audio with this crash, as with any crashes I got while running iTunes or VLC under 10.4.4, was consistent with some kind of significant event, but not a kernel panic (for me, that's usually been the system consistently holding the last tone it knew what to do with). Crashes with Windows Media Player in the past, for whatever use that is, would be silent.

(RealPlayer got a lot of colorspace errors this time around, if that also helps.)

I unplugged any and all Firewire drives (took nonesssential USB devides out of the chain the other day; she's now only got speakers, the original keyboard and mouse in place, I think) out of paranoia, just to eliminate possibilities. I haven't noticed any pattern with regards to external devices being there or not, but I at least wanted clutter out of the way in the logs.

Not five minutes later, the display froze again as I was configuring a screensaver to run for several minutes before the display went to sleep. Audio seemed fine, though, so I ssh'd in and checked process -- sure enough, everything else was normal, but WindowServer had become a stuck process. (Not taking up any significant CPU, just stuck.)

I'm going to leave the machine off for a few hours before bringing her back up again, on the off chance that it is a cold solder on the logic board (I want as much troubleshooting time as I can get!). Aside from doublechecking if I did, in fact, stick on current Quicktime, is there anything else I can look for that might be useful here?

I've been doing some digging and it seems a whole lot of people are having this issue.

Here's what I've found:
Affects: eMac 1.25Ghz G4 USB 2.0 with ATI Radeon chipset

Symptom: Hard freeze of the machine related to graphical activity
(minimizing, magnification, DVD, QT, games, progress bars, sheets, etc)

Action: Hold power button to restart machine

Known:
- Apple Hardware Test passes
- Repairing the disk/permissions does nothing
- Resetting the PRAM/NVRAM does nothing
- Format and restore sometimes helps temporarily but sometimes the system locks up during the system restore
- RAM is irrelevant
- OS version is irrelevant
- Running the ATI update improves performance temporarily, but only after running an OS update first
- FIFO buffer overflow error message in the system log:
( in Terminal: cat /var/log/system.log | grep ATI )
- Exploded/leaking capacitors on the logic board
- Usually occurs within 6 months of purchase, but depends on use

Work Around:
- Removing ATI Extensions alleviates issue but reduces performance
(in Safe Boot [shift-key at startup] remove /system/extensions/ATI*)

Only Known Permanent Solution:
- Replacing the logic board (approx. $400 + labour)

Apple does not seem to be aware of this.
Regardless of warranty, I suggest that each one of us that has this issue call them up.
If enough people can substantiate this problem, they may proceed with a repair program similar to the one they did for the iBooks.