Screen pixelates, freezes, then must shut down

[pear2apple]

I have a iMac G5 that I bought right when they came out, so in 2004 I think. Its a 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5, 2 GB DDR SDRAM (which I just upgraded to about 1 year ago), and I am running Version 10.4.11.

I have about 10GB of memory open, the rest is full, so I am aware I need to free up more space, just on the fence about how to do it.

So, the problem is today I turned it on, opened Safari and was playing on Facebook, I had it open maybe 5 mins when the screen started to pixelate but first I thought Facebook was just being weird again, when it started happening to the whole screen. Then I moved the mouse to shut down Safari and a block of yellow and black started filling the screen and thats when I manually shut it down. This has happened before, maybe in 2006 and I had to get it fixed, but I do not recall what was wrong with it.

Any ideas? I haven't opened Safari again because I don't want my computer to crash. I absolutely love this thing and while I do have some things backed up, I'm storing lots of important things on here. Is it time I just bought a new computer or should I buy an ext hard drive and maybe this is just a storage issue, or do I need to take it somewhere?

I'm just wondering if, because its about 6 years old now, if its worth to pay to get anything fixed? But I just upgraded everything about a year ago when I bought more RAM. If I were to get a new computer, can I take this RAM out of here and put it in the new one? Or would that all be wasted?

Thanks for any help. I don't know how long Mac's should last as this is my first one, and I know very little about maintenance on them.

 

[Hellhammer]

That sounds like GPU related so you can't really fix it for reasonable price. If there is some data you need, get an external HD ASAP and back it up, but otherwise, I would use it as long as it works.

 

[pear2apple]

OMG it just happened again. But it started slower and I was able to shut it down from the Apple before it went too crazy.

Another bill is not what I need! So I guess I will check thru the forum for an external hard drive suggestion and get everything backed up asap before it all comes crashing down.

PS. Whats GPU mean?

 

[Hellhammer]

PS. Whats GPU mean?

Graphic Processing Unit (A.K.A. video card, graphics card etc)

 

[pear2apple]

Yeah, I had a feeling you would say that. Not really worth it for me to spend money on that. What kinds of graphics does that affect? Is that only for games or does that affect my graphic design programs? Adobe CS? Because I need that stuff to work more than I want to play some internet game.

I think I will buy this Ext HD:
SAMSUNG STORY Station 1TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive HX-DU010EB - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152178

It got 153 reviews at NewEgg and only 11 of them are Poor or less. I think thats pretty good and I could care less what it looks like or whether or not I need to plug it in, or if there is an annoying blinking light. I just need it to store all my stuff, including my music and graphic files, and last for awhile.

Also, whats a good backup program? I really don't backup anything except by CD or DVD and I'd like to make a start up disk but not sure where to start. Can you link me to a step by step guide or something?

Eventually I'm going to buy a used Mac laptop, when I do this, can I take my RAM from my iMac and put it in there?

Thanks

 

[nebarik]

Yeah, I had a feeling you would say that. Not really worth it for me to spend money on that. What kinds of graphics does that affect? Is that only for games or does that affect my graphic design programs? Adobe CS? Because I need that stuff to work more than I want to play some internet game.

I think I will buy this Ext HD:
SAMSUNG STORY Station 1TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive HX-DU010EB - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152178

It got 153 reviews at NewEgg and only 11 of them are Poor or less. I think thats pretty good and I could care less what it looks like or whether or not I need to plug it in, or if there is an annoying blinking light. I just need it to store all my stuff, including my music and graphic files, and last for awhile.

Also, whats a good backup program? I really don't backup anything except by CD or DVD and I'd like to make a start up disk but not sure where to start. Can you link me to a step by step guide or something?

Eventually I'm going to buy a used Mac laptop, when I do this, can I take my RAM from my iMac and put it in there?

Thanks

the GPU unit controls the screen in general. hence the pixelation then crash your experiencing. its only gonna get worse with time. until one day it wont turn on at all.

as far as backup goes. time machine is pretty damn handy. free on leopard if you have it. if not just copy your files manually to it.

you cant move your ram over to a new laptop for many different reasons. wrong speed, wrong size, no empty slots on the MB, and its not useraccessable to install new ram on the laptops now. plus the MB comes with 2GB standard anyway. 4GB on the MBPs

 

[pear2apple]

OK So I bought a Samsung STORY 1TB external hard drive. Just got it today, plugged it in and it popped up. The software is not formatted for Mac so I'm looking to use Carbon Copy Cloner, I downloaded it, picked my Source Disk: MAC HD and selected the specific files that I want backup. I went to choose the Target Disk, Samsung, and a window pops up and says "SAMSUNG is not an HFS+ formatted volume....CCC requires that the source and target volumes are formatted as HFS+. Click the "Help" button below to read more about this requirement in the CCC documentation."

So I clicked Help but didn't get any. So then I clicked Launch Disk Utility but still don't get it. So Instead I choose New Disk Image... as my Target Disk. Then choosing Samsung again as my Where: to save my backup, it has additional disk image options: Create a Read-Only Disk Image....I DON'T WANT IT READ ONLY! And the other option is to Create A Read/Write "sparse" disk image. What is that?!

So I chose the Sparse disk image option and THEN it tells me it can't unmount my disk! WTF!

I am getting so mad over here! If I choose the Read-Only option it will write, but I don't want a disk image do I? How can I access one file at a time and use it from my Ext HD if its an image?!

Can someone send me a link or tell me a book I could read that actually explains things clearly?! I don't want to take this thing into a store to be told how to use this drive. This is not easy like the reviews said it was!!

 

[Hellhammer]

Open Disk Utility -> Select the external HD from right-hand-side menu -> Click Partition -> Give it a name and select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) -> Click Execute (or something similar)

It's now in HFS+ and can be used with Macs and CCC

 

[pear2apple]

Thanks for your reply. I ended up having to shut down and reboot and then finally it wasn't obsessed with this unmounting stuff.

I ended up deleting CCC and downloading a different program that proved much easier to work with. I just erased my Samsung and I guess that reformatted it and now it all works!

So I'm no longer in a freak-out panic mode that I bought the wrong drive!

 

[pear2apple]

OK another question. I think I'm reading this right, but just in case, if you could read and be sure it is what I want!

"Incremental backups: This will create multiple folders, up to the limit you choose, so you have incremental backups over a period of time. If you choose 3 folders, Backuplist+ will create a new folder at each session and delete the earliest folder always leaving 3 folders. After you reach the set limit, backuplist+ will delete the earliest backup and create the new one.

These are true incremental backups which means after the initial backup, each backup will be a mirror of the last one, copying only the files that have changed. This saves a tremendous amount of disk space and gives you exact snapshots of your files from each backup time period. Amazing! This works because rsync makes hard links to the files (kind of like aliases but different) You can check this by looking at the size of the disk after an incremental backup. It should only reflect a small change for the newly added files. You can not check the size of the backup folder itself - the Finder will give you the size of all the files disregarding that they are hard links. You can only tell by checking the disk size( "Get info" on the disk icon.)"

I just backed-up my initial items, so now I have a folder of all my Photos on my ext HD. Now everytime after this I ONLY want to copy over the new items, not everything over and over again. I want to copy the updated items into the existing (or a new dated folder) when I have my scheduled weekly backups.

So, since I want to ONLY backup the new items weekly, that means I do NOT check "incremental backups" correct? Or..? See I am confused by the second paragraph.

However I want all my music to be in the same folder because I plan to run iTunes from my ext HD.