eMac Constantly Freezing

[thesdx]

Some friends of mine recently called me to see if I could fix their eMac that's constantly freezing up and being slow, and I told them I'd give it a shot. Before I go over there this afternoon to fix it, I just wanted to get some ideas on what could be causing this. Is it just that eMacs are too old?

 

[jroller]

Age should not be a factor, unless the hardware is going bad. You can use their install disk and run apple's hardware test to confirm the hardware (think you hold down the option key on boot and select the hardware test (although, as I recall, the emacs came with a separate hardware test disk). I'd start by running fsck and using Apple's Disk Utility. About halfway down this page you will find instructions for doing that.

 

[TraceyS/FL]

My eMac isnt' freezing - or the kids would be hollering at me about it! LOL!

I can't offer much advice - did they mention if it was freezing only with one app? anything? how much free hard drive space are they at? HOw much RAM?

Age could come into play if a component was dying, but i'm not sure what to tell you to look for. Have you poked around the Apple Discussion forums? Often if something is happening to a bunch of people with computers the same age then you can go with the "the ____ might be dying".

 

[sabregreen]

eMacs are very notorious for having Display issues. 1 in 4 of the eMacs we ordered, 300+, had to have the display replaced. This presents itself as a shrinking/cropped screen. A logic board, memory, or hard drive can cause freezing. I would try to run the hardware test from apple if you have it to see if anything comes up. If not, you can try another set of memory as this is the cheapest fix you could do.

 

[mwchris]

Some friends of mine recently called me to see if I could fix their eMac that's constantly freezing up and being slow, and I told them I'd give it a shot. Before I go over there this afternoon to fix it, I just wanted to get some ideas on what could be causing this. Is it just that eMacs are too old?

I recently (couple years ago) troubleshooted several emacs that were having problems with freezing/locking up at random times. It turns out there is an extended warranty that Apple has issued to take care of this. If I recall it was all due to a bad logic board.

Check the following link and see if the emac you are working on fits with in the serial number constraints. Hope this helps.

http://www.apple.com/support/emac/repairextensionprogram/

 

[Pixellated]

Reinstall the OS, 7200RPM Drive, CPU upgrade from iFixit, RAM

 

[sabregreen]

The logic boards are a common problem on the eMac models just like the Display issues I already mentioned, though not as common.

 

[tbohlsennswssrg]

My brother's emac is also frezzing all the time

My brother's eMac hates Mac OS X 10.5.x "Leopard", it's "Tiger" Partition works fine.

Stats:

1.42 Ghz PowerPC G4 Processor (1 Processor, Single 'Core')
1 GB Apple RAM
OS: Mac OS X Partition: 10.5.x; Mac OS 9.2.2: 10.4.11, 9.22 (Not Bootable)
GPU: ATI Raedon 9600
Identifier: PowerMac 6,4 (eMac 2005)
Optical Drive: 'SuperDrive'

I have run TechTool Pro version 4.6, Apple Hardware Test, Repaired the Disk, Repaired Disk Permissions. Any Ideas . It always is the "Leopard" Partion not the "Tiger" partion.

Please Help !!!

 

[cMacSW]

I recently had an experience with a mini that would freeze randomly. I suspected bad RAM and ran the mem check utilys that are out there and every thing checked out OK. In spite of this I swapped out the memory and haven't had a freeze since.