Long time Mac user with really weird thing happening

[csiking]

Hey all!

Looking for a little help on this one. Weird...when I start up and I get the Apple logo screen with the spinning dotted wheel (not the beach ball) some times I that dotted wheel starts getting little colored dots around it in a square then the dots fill the square completely and the computer locks up. And in addition to that lately I am getting just random lock ups and I can't even force quit anything.

I know that random lock ups could be anything but thought I would mention it since the two issues may be related some how. Again both are random and not consistent.

Any insight to the square around the spinning wheel thing?

Thanks

 

[rmh]

I honestly have no idea what that could be. If I were in your situation, I'd backup my files and reinstall OSX. However, it might be a good idea to wait and see if anyone else on the forums has a suggestion that wouldn't take so much work.

 

[richard.mac]

try resetting your pram by holding command-option-P-R on startup for two chimes. this has helped me before with startup problems.

 

[Sun Baked]

Try repairing the drive from the DVD, or using fsck.

Back up the drive completely, important stuff first.

Drive slowing down, and random lockups/freezes like that can be drive related. And at the rate drives fail, it could very well be the first (or last) signs of a dying drive.

 

[samh004]

People say this all the time, and other people say it does nothing, but if you can boot into your mac, have you tried verifying and repairing permissions ? I had a weird font issue just the other day, a simple verify and repair later and it was sorted.

If you can't boot in, boot off the disc instead and do it from there.

 

[csiking]

You know it's funny because it is only once and a while it does this (a little more often recently) and in all regards the system is acting and sounding fine. Also I don't think it is drive related because I have two drives both having a system on the drive...I use one drive for everyday stuff and one for only audio. And, it is happening when I am in both systems.

I have found that when this happens if I shut down (hard shut down) and then unplug the computer for about 2 minutes it seems better. I also forgot one thing that it also does once and a while...all of a sudden one of my two monitors that I am using (dual monitors) will just go black like I shut down while the other monitor will be fine. So I was wondering if this was a video card issue. The card is a Radeon 9800 Pro Special Edition - does anyone think that that could have something to do with these issues?

I have done Disc Utility - Disk Warrior & Tech Tool Pro on all drives and partitions.

Thanks for the suggestions so far.

 

[gloss]

Sounds like it may be artifacting caused by the GPU overheating or somesuch. Have you cleaned out the computer recently? Get some canned air and blow out the heat sinks - you'd be surprised how much dust will build up in there and prevent the GPU from cooling properly.

 

[brkirch]

Try running hardware test and see if any problems are reported.