iMac starting to crash frequently

Mac
#1

G’day,

My Early 2009 24" iMac running Mavericks has started to crash semi regularly - few times a week at least…

Tends to be following video work - as “easy” as YouTube watching, or just now encoding a DVD…

The only other thing I can comment on, is that the system seems to occasionally “lose” the USB keyboard - even though it’s plugged in, key strokes are ignored, and the caps light does not go on, until I pull the cord and re-plug it…

Is there something sinister I need to looking for here? Or should I just consider a OS reinstal etc?

cheers
cosmic

#3

Video, especially on the older Core 2 Duo’s can actually cause high CPU usage, same story for multiple web tabs open in Chrome (I assume Safari does the same but I tend to use Chrome more).

You could always try one of those live Linux versions and see if you get the same behaviour on a clean system or not.
Alternatively it’s possible to install and run a clean OS from an external drive to see if that helps. If you don’t have one lying about a cheap SSD might be the go (although either way you’re stuck with USB2 for the interface (unless you get a firewire dock that supports firewire 800… but you might as well stick with USB so you can use it for other things later).

Assuming it’s heat you get into the harder things, like pulling it apart, cleaning out the dust, reseating heat sinks and all that. Something worth doing if you’re replacing the HDD anyway.

After than you’re down to worse things like logic boards :frowning:

#4

Hi Cosmic,

My Mid-2011 27" iMac was doing a similar thing with random reboots and occasional screen corruption, but nothing with the keyboard. It turned out to be a dud GPU. A boot into diagnostics did not show up anything, because of course that uses the unaccelerated frame buffer, not the GPU! Playing YouTube will use the GPU for H.264 decoding. Running one of the Unigine benchmarks would crash the machine in seconds.

I’ve also had random reboots occur with security software running.

#5

Mavericks is a truly horrible version of OSX… At least in my experience.

#7

I’ve found El Cap to be pretty good. Mavericks even on clean installs seems hopeless and I’ve got machines at work that do so much better with a clean install of El Cap compared with Mavericks.

#9

From experience in the workshop, Mavericks wasn’t half bad, but El Capitan was dreadful. The performance wasn’t there, and unfortunately for everyone with a standard hard drive that believed Apple’s promise of “a refined experience and improved performance for your Mac”, it was even worse. Throw Spotlight into the mix and the machine was unusable.

Hopefully Sierra is much better.

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#10

Maybe I was cursed, but Mavericks was a disaster for me - no end of issues (Kernel Panics etc) and terrible terrible battler life and reduced performance over Mountain Lion.

El Capitan seems to run better than Yosemite, which was for me at least an improvement on Mavericks. El Cap and Yosemite were the first two I found actually improved things on a non clean install on a HDD.

Sierra has been terrible for me so far, can not get Spotlight to work at all.

IMHO ML was the last version of OSX to run acceptably on a mechanical HD, however Apple soldiers on selling the majority of its desktop machines and one very popular MBP with them. Shame they can’t get OSX to perform like Windows 10 on a mechanical HD.

#11

I also feel that way. I would have preferred more bug fixes for El Cap instead of Sierra.

#12

Then you get our current Mac situation. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

#13

The current situation is hardware not software… most people I know would be happier with 2 yearly updates. OSX never gets mature anymore as just as a version starts to reach stability, the cycle starts again.

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#14

It seems like it could be a failing logic board, older Core 2 Macs won’t handle encoding as well as newer Macs with Core i processors, you could have caused a situation where your CPU is overheating without realisng it. There is no CPU monitor in OS X which is daft…

Or it could just be dust, when was the last time you opened up your iMac and cleaned it, perhaps never? If your computer is full of dust it could possibly be overheating also, all of this will case the sort of crashing and logic board failures.

I had an original Aluminum MacBook before this one it got some dust in the CPU fan and the rest was a replacement of the entire logic board as the CPU is soldered to the board. The crashing along with the unresponsiveness together makes me think the issue is more sinister, USB ports can and do fail, but the fact that you’re getting a hard lockup also suggests to me that its either dust, or your logic board is on the way out.

#15

I do want to migrate to the final optical drive iMac at some point… But not really ready to do that now…

Ordinarily if I was going to have to pop the case, I’d look at putting a SSD in at the same time as de-fluffing… But I guess there’s no point grabbing a SSD kit for this machine if it turns out to have major issues… (IE No, I’ve not opened this iMac up… read the instructions when I got it, and decided against it as I don’t have suction caps…)

Given the volume of video encoding I’m embarking on… I guess I’ll know soon one way or the other.

#17

I opened mine without suction cups. Used a spudger from an iphone repair kit to lever the screen off. Have seen others use a spatula or other thin bit of plastic to do the same.

#18

Thanks for the quote this is an obvious statement of course. You should download an app or a widget to check that you’re not cooking your CPU. You don’t need suction cups to get into your mac, you can even use a little bit of tape to pop the screen protector off and go from there.

#19

To revisit this old drama… The iMac has been only crashing periodically… though I’d say “more” in the past 1-2 months.

I’ve just set up Hardware Monitor (app) and it tells me the Graphics Processor Temp Diode is 61C (heat sink at 51C) - that’s just browsing the net, no videos. Northbridge Chip is 71C. CPU itself is only 45C.

I’ll try keep an eye on the stats and see if there’s a spike when it crashes next…

#20

iMac froze again… GPU temp was only 56C… so guessing that’s not the issue.

Tried to read some of the gobbledygook in Console, but couldn’t see anything specific at the time of the crash…

#21

I’m wondering now if the issue may be the HDD. It passes SMART check, but i read that if no crash log entry is being registered then it may be the drive…

I am loathe to buy a new one, but just remembered I have a spare WD Mybook that’s only 12 months old with barely any use, so think I’ll look into swapping the drive out and see if the random crashes continue. Pretty sure it should be a 7200 Green drive - could do worse for a boot volume.

#22

WD never made 7200 RPM green drives, so it will be a 5400 RPM unit.

#23

? Google disagrees…?

I have a pair in a FireWire box as video scratch disk - thought they were 7200.

#24

Please cite sources :slight_smile:

https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Western_Digital_Green

Even WD Reds are 5400, Blacks and Red Pros are 7200