[Markovich]

Hi quick question regarding my Rev B, DP 1.8 G5 with a 9600XT vid card,OEM RAM and 80 gig HD.

I was playing Call of Duty Muliplayer last night and the G5 locked up and played a very loud and continuous beep. The beep lasted about 10 seconds. The sound stopped by itself, but the G5 was still locked up ,requiring a hard shut down.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Mark

[macaddict0001]

Hardware problem of some sort. possibly logic board related.

[Detrius]

Hard freezes are most often hardware related when you are running OS X--but not always. Bad RAM is also a very common cause of hard freezes and kernel panics with G5s.

Run the Apple Hardware Test. Keep in mind, though, that with any software based test, a passing score doesn't necessarily mean you have good hardware--it just means the software didn't see any issues.

[Big Mac]

I'm not sure how one can deduce from the evidence provided that it is necessarily a hardware problem. It sounds more like a bug in the game. If it happens again, or if other applications act abnormally, then investigate further. No need to make yourself crazy over something that probably is nothing.

[Markovich]

Well, I certainly hope so! It hasnt happened again. The game in question was my 5 year old son's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets game from Aspyr. He thought he had broken the computer! I was very puzzled by it. In the 15 years Ive been using Macs, Ive never experienced that!

Mark

Originally posted by Big Mac:
I'm not sure how one can deduce from the evidence provided that it is necessarily a hardware problem. It sounds more like a bug in the game. If it happens again, or if other applications act abnormally, then investigate further. No need to make yourself crazy over something that probably is nothing.

[Big Mac]

Originally posted by Markovich:
Well, I certainly hope so! It hasnt happened again. The game in question was my 5 year old son's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets game from Aspyr. He thought he had broken the computer! I was very puzzled by it. In the 15 years Ive been using Macs, Ive never experienced that!

Mark

Games can do weird things, especially poorly ported games like that Harry Potter title may well be. Games take liberties with hardware that other applications don't take, so if something goes wrong with a game, the way it crashes may seem more severe than the crashing of regular applications. Did you try force quitting the game? Often, you can press the force quit command combo (command+option+escape) and then press return, and the game will quit even though no force quit dialog is visible. However, It does sound like you may have had a kernel panic. You can take a look in the Console utility to see if there is any panic log. Tell your son that he did not do anything wrong and that he can't break the computer by just using it normally. (Kids get spooked when computers don't function properly; I know that was true for me!)