[ABoarman]

I recently got a refurbished PowerPC G4 off of Ebay with 512 MB of Ram and an 80 GB hardrive. I am currently running OS X version 10.4 and have benefitted from increased speed over my previous G4.

However, when I leave my computer to do other things in the office, it eventually goes to a screensaver and later to sleep. About half of the time I return and move/ click the mouse to wake it up again, I am then faced with a frozen screen. There are times where the screensaver image stays frozen and others where i can see the applications but do nothing. Furthermore, sometimes the cursor still moves around while other times it wont move either.

Once in a while, hitting Escape brings it all to life, but most of the time i am forced to hold in the power button and manually restart it all over again.

Did I get hosed by an Ebay purchase? Or is there still hope?

[Waragainstsleep]

Could be a software issue. Did you reinstall the OS?
Otherwise you can stop it from sleeping the display or the whole machine from the energy saver preference pane. You could try switching to another screensaver or switching the saver off too. I would actually switch the screensaver off first and test for the problem. If that fixes it (let the display go to sleep to test, speed it up from the energy saver pane), try a different screen saver. If it comes back again, then it would seem appropriate to try an archive & install of your OS.

Check your console system logs for any signs of what exactly might be causing the crashes.

Bad RAM is another possibilty. Try removing some or get some more to try out.
USB devices can cause sleep/wake issues too. Unplug any you have except keyboard and mouse, then re-test. If it still happens, try another keyboard and mouse and test again.


Still plenty of hope, don't worry yet.

[chris v]

Plenty of PCI cards have been known to cause sleep issues as well. Are there any cards in any of the slots? If so, try removing them and see if the issue persists.