eMac freezes randomly, open window turns into broken up jibber

I'm happy to report that my eMac was taken care of by Apple and repaired at no cost. I've been with Apple since my Apple IIc (then Mac IIci, Quadra 840AV, Color Classic II, PowerBook 1400c, PowerMac 6100, iMac, eMac, Mac mini, iBook, TiBook, ad nauseum) and will continue to be an Apple fanatic as long as I am computing.

apple man came today and all is well. it was a couple days later than initally promised, but that's not too bad in the grand scheme of things ...

Dropped off my eMac Monday Night for repair, got it back yesterday afternoon.

Logic board replaced. All is well again in the world of Apple.

Logicboard replaced at no charge!
In Apple I thrust! 🙂

Dropped mine off yesterday and hope to have it back by Friday. Thanks to this forum we can all stay informed and get results. Just think if we didn't have this forum. I would have been wiping my hard drive to reinstall OSX with no luck, not knowing that this was a wide spread issue. Heck Apple would probably never issued a warranty repair and individually we would have payed out of pocket to repair our machines.

eMac 1.25ghz, 1gig ram, S.D. 160g Mac OS X (10.4.7)

If Apple hadn't agreed to the free repair, I'd firstly be using my Pismo as my main machine, and secondly be without another computer for at least 2 years while I finish studying... not good when I'm doing film/tv and need a machine that I can edit on.

Oh man! I had some hope for a moment. My serial number starts with G843xxxxx and we bought this late Aug 04. I, of course, have gotten use of the computer since deleting the ati extensions, BUT my superdrive isn't working and I need to create some CDs. This is completely ridiculous as much as we paid for these computers!

UPDATE as of 7/6/06.

After I posted again yesterday, I decided to just go ahead and restore and install software on the eMac as a last ditch since I really did need functionality of the SuperDrive that I had to disable to perform basic tasks on the computer. At the very end of the reinstall, my computer froze up again.

Here's what really gets to me. Every time that I've ever phoned Apple, they immediately act like they have no idea what I am talking about. I explained it very clearly and they said since I was out of AppleCare, I was out of luck (same as several months ago). When I became more insistent that MY computer was part of the bad logic board batch, he started asking me more questions about issues, still maintaining that it must be a software issue, that it was probably my reinstall disks. I was pretty mad at that point and explained that I had used those disks ONCE to set up and never again until yesterday, so I knew it wasn't that. Round and round and round.

I finally asked him (quote) "okay, yes or no, is my computer within the DATES of the "non-recall? I realize the serial doesn't match, but I bought it the last week of August 04 at Apple in San Diego. DOES the date match"? He replied that my computer WAS within the date of the "non-recall".

FINALLY, after being on hold for a few, he came back and said that I should take it to the Apple Store (now in Charlotte) to have them look at it, he'd make me an appt at Genius bar, and they'd be able to tell.

Made me nervous because when we first discovered the issue and couldn't do ANYTHING without it freezing up, we took it to Apple and it worked perfectly for like two hours!

They found it. BUT, they first played seriously dumb. They give you that look like "huh"? But after he did some testing, he said, oh this is definitely the issue that we've been seeing. So you did or did know about it? PLEASE gimme a break.

SO...they are fixing it at no charge and it's there now. 3-5 business days.

Be persistent...they nearly hung up on me yesterday when they determined that they "couldn't help me".

WOW! I've just spent DAYS of frustration with this problem, and rang up a mate (who knows more about macs than I do) and he got me onto this thread...

Amazingly enough, It's only taken me a few mins to understand what my computer's problems are, thanks to everyone's involvement in this thread.

Particularly helpful was finding my serial number listed.

Now I have only 2 problems to sort out:
1) the nearest Applke Centre is over an hour's drive away, and I can't get there during business hours
2) my emac is currently nearing the end of it's Flexi-rent term (it finishes in about 5 months) and as I've been VERY happy with it's performance (up until this week) I have recently agreed to purchase it outright.

So now I'm not sure which entity I need to go through - Flexirent or Apple?

But at least I know what is wrong, and come Monday morning business hours, I'll be getting it all sorted!

My computer's working again!! Although it's an amusing comedy of errors...

I live over three hours away from the nearest Apple store or certified repair place. So the Apple Executive Rep who was on my case assigned me an in-house service... they came in and brought the tools they'd need. But - the first logic board didn't work. (We didn't discover this until AFTER we'd put everything back together, all 30 billion screws back on.) So he had to leave, after requesting another board. Couple days later he came back, and my eMac works now!

My confidence and faith in Apple has been amply restored.

hello I have a emac 1ghz that is having the screen jibber. The jibber does not occur in safe mode. The thing is that the serial number is not in the range. My serial number is G83421XXXXX. I got this machine second hand so I am not sure when I was purchased. I havent had a chance to open it yet to check for buldging or leaking caps.
Does anyone think I have a chance of getting this repair for free?

Thanks,

emac

sko, if you find it has leaking caps, then I'd urge you to contact Apple and put your case to them... namely that although yours falls outside the serial numbers, it has the same problem, and should be repaired.

Best of luck.

Graham Down, on July 26, coming to this list of 612 people whose eMacs keep freezing, and reading most of the messages, ...and who now has this problem too, is asking if Apple has responded in any way, or am I on my own in solving this?

Today is likely your lucky day. If you do have the bulging capacitor problem apple has a repair extention program where they will fix it for free: http://www.apple.com/support/emac/repairextensionprogram/

iMac Core Duo 20" 2Ghz Mac OS X (10.4.6) also have a iMac Mini Core Duo 1.66GHz (Media Center) and a 17" eMac G4 1.25GHz

Thanks for all the helpful posts about this topic:

The eMac I'm working on - for friends running a business which depends on their eMacs - sporadically displays this same video problem and it falls within the range of the Serial Numbers which Apple quotes on the eMac Repair Extension Program.

It's odd to see this as a hardware capacitor problem - as mentioned in various similar threads about this video corruption - rather than as a logic board or other display board problem, because it happens specifically and repeatably when using Word X for Mac and choosing Word's Preferences from just beneath ' Word' at top-left of the screen.

The drop-down menu beneath the word ' Word' (where Preferences sits) immediately corrupts - every time - as soon as I click on the word Preferences ..and the eMac then freezes.

This doesn't happen if I use the keyboard shortcut (Apple-key and comma ..⌘, ) for Word's Preferences, but only if I click on the actual word ' Preferences' itself.

..Whoops! ..Now that I've activated it using ⌘, the eMac continues to work OK if I do choose the word ' Preferences' from the drop-down menu..

Curiouser and curiouser..

We-e-ll, feel free to disregard this post ..except for the thanks to all those who've pointed out items to investigate in the previous posts in this thread. Thanks.

<..shakes head, goes for a walk, retires to bed..>

Needless to say, this eMac will be going back to Apple as soon as it's been cloned to another working one..