g5 Tower - where to find help & parts, calgary.

beetle.babe · Jan 23rd, 2010, 02:13 PM

here.

So a nice G5 tower found it's way into my apartment (given to me for free). The previous owner had "diagnosed" the issue as 2 bad processors. I decided to take it apart and figure out for myself what it wrong (with some help, as I am not THAT computer savvy). It's a June '04 Model with 1.8 dual processors.

First, we plugged in a hard drive and loaded an OS - 10.4 Tiger. It worked, and we found ourselves capable of using the mac for many hours without interruptions. Then, randomly, the computer started to lock up.

First, we thought it was the memory - we fiddled with it and eventually replaced it. Overall, the mac ran better, but it still locked up. It originally had 3GB of RAM, but it was mismatching and not very good (according to someone...) so we eventually replaced it with 2GB of decent & new RAM.

Then, we tried additional cooling of the graphics card. This seemed to help, but not as much as we'd hoped.

As I don't have the discs that came with the Mac, I'm not able to perform the hardware test.

We're still not 100% sure that it's a processor issue - but we'd really like to fix the computer, either way. It'll be my second mac, and I'd really hate to lose the case to my boyfriend, who will ultimately stick a PC in there and make me very unhappy.

Ultimately, I'm hoping someone has some insight into this whole locking up thing my computer seems to be doing, and possibly for some help locating parts locally for it - things like the graphics card or processors.

The only other thing (and he thinks it's not a big deal) is that he installed a wireless card with an apple driver that wasn't necessarily for a Mac.

Thanks!

Paddy · Jan 24th, 2010, 09:36 PM

Well - I'd take that wireless card out and see if the lockups continue. Could be the entire problem right there. I had a graphics card in a SP 1.8GHz G5 that was a Mac graphics card upgrade and supposed to work just fine and even after applying the fixes that were supposed to make everything all better, it still kernel panicked every time I woke it from sleep. Finally I just put the original graphics card back in and bye bye problems.

Can you look in the system logs to see if they reveal anything about the lockups? I'm assuming you're getting a hard freeze - not a kernel panic? Unfortunately hard freezes don't always yield much info in the system logs, though you should be able to see what processes were active just prior to the forced shutdown and whether or not it's the same event each time.

There are links to things to try here:

Freezing G5 Dual 1.8GHZ [Archive] - The macosxhints Forums

Note: coolant leaks are not applicable to your model. Nor is the random shut down caused by a faulty power supply.

Unfortunately, if none of the trouble-shooting in those links works, it's possible that you have a faulty logic board. That probably wouldn't be worth replacing in a Mac of that vintage, costing more than the thing is worth in total.

It's also possible that the hard drive has issues, though less likely. Still, if you can find another HD to try, that might be worth doing. (Do you happen to have Disk Warrior?)

Can you also run Disk Utility from the OS 10.4 install CD/DVD and see if there are any things that get repaired?

beetle.babe · Jan 25th, 2010, 01:01 AM

Well. Problem is diagnosed.

After much fiddling, we removed one processor, and then the other, and attempted to run the computer each time.

We've learned lots.

Including that one processor is hooped. But one is perfectly fine.

So right now, we're running the computer on the one processor, and it's running fine. It has not locked up once, and we've sat here watching "The Ugly Truth" while surfing the interweb and loading applications.

But, if anyone knows where we can purchase another processor locally, that would be fabulous.