Okay here's the deal. I got this Powermac G4 Sawtooth. When I got it it had a G4 450, DVD, 256MB, 27GB, Zip. When I got it I took out the old DVD drive and replaced it with a new CD. I added more memory to bump it up to 512. I took the old HDD out and replaced it with a new Segate 7200 rpm ATA 133 HDD. Finally I installed a fresh copy of Panther. Now down to the problem. My Mac keeps locking on me. I posted before and was told to take out the memory I added. I did that and it seemed to fix the problem. Then today while I was playing with iTunes and surfing the net BAM!!! it locked again. It froze colder than an ice cube and my iTunes sounded like and old 60's record with a bad skip. I'm about to give up, I don't know what else to try. The CD I installed was just a cheap PC style CD. I installed the new HDD but didn't upgrade the controller card. All the memory I put in it has been taken out with the exception of the 256MB chip that came wih it. When I installed Panther I did a custom install and took out all the extra language crap and didn't initialize the HDD with the Mac OS 9 drivers like it asks you too. It seems to like to die when I'm running iTunes but I've had it die while installing a printer and also while formatting zip disks too. Can anybody tell me what I'm doing wrong. I love my Mac but if I can't trust it its back to a PC... and I HATE windows so I'm open to any suggestions. Thanks in advance for all the help.
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My Mac keeps locking up
- Thread starter jeffnjanel
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I'd still be suspicious of the RAM. Just because the RAM that's in there came with the machine doesn't mean it's good. I recently was having similar problems (unexpected, frequent lock ups) with my PC, and it turned out to be the RAM, which had been in the machine and working fine for two and a half years until it failed. Have you run the hardware test that's on the discs that came with the machine? Anyway, if you've got RAM from another computer that you know is good, you might want to stick it in your Mac and see if that fixes the problem. If it fixes it, you can go buy new RAM for your Mac. If not, I don't know what to tell you. It could be some other hardware problem unrelated to RAM, in which case you'll have to either pay someone to fix it, or get a new Mac 
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.Is it a full on lockup or is the cpu usage shooting to 100%? I interpret your itunes comment to mean that it starts skipping, meaning that the os is still going. Have you checked to see what is using up the cpu? Maybe something it accesses is corrupt.
Jim
Jim
It's a full lockup. The mouse don't work and the mac won't respont to the keyboard to try a forcequit.
jeffnjanel said:
Your computer isn't full-on dying, it's running out of resources. Open the activity monitor and see what's running. You might have a RAM issue, so run the hardware test just to be sure. If you're consistently having this problem in iTunes, try trashing your iTunes preferences.