[TheDigitalMan]

Hi,

I hope I am posting in the right area. I have a G4 DP 800 that has served me well for years. Just recently it has started to act up and my gut feeling is the CPUs are getting too hot. The first time it acted up I opened the case and felt the heat sinks. I just about burned my hand on them. I left the case open and put a large box fan blowing on the open case. I rebooted and the machine seemed to behave much better. I should also mention that our central heat & air quit working this spring and I'm wondering if the warmer climate in the house may not be so good for my G4. We've been saving our sheckals to get it fixed.

Rotate and Re-Size functions in Illustrator seem to trigger it's funky behaviour also. Sometimes it will seem to be working fine and I can surf the internet and even draw in Illustrator but if I go to re-size my drawing or rotate it then the machine flakes out and ultimately I end up having to shut everything down and reboot.

Is there anything else I should be looking at other than cooling the CPUs better? Will cooling them better fix the problem or is it possible they have already suffered irreparable damage?

How can I test some of these components? Like the CPUs? I'm looking for some sage advice here. Some guidance.

Thanks

[Lateralus]

It's hard to tell if heat is your problem.

The QuickSilver case has the stupidest and least effective airflow system of any Apple case I have ever seen. The main case fan does next to nothing other than humm really loud.

When I overclock my GigaDesigns Dual processor upgrade to 1.47GHz, the system will crash after about 10 minutes of 100% CPU use. If I leave the door open, it will take hours to crash. So, leaving the door open actually allows much better airflow.

What I can suggest is that you leave the door of your G4 open and perform the tasks that normally cause problems, see if heat is indeed your problem.

I am about an inch away from doing an ATX conversion into an aluminum Kingwin case. It is a rather simple task now that Kingwin, CoolerMaster and Lian Li cases have Mac-ATX board mounts drilled in them. You no longer have to drill the holes yourself.

[titan44]

Yeah i love that lian-li g5 case knock off - pretty tempting seeing i've maxed out the internal storage on my sawtooth

[TheDigitalMan]

O.K. tonight I booted the machine up to get some work done. I had 4 art charges to do. It started out immediately acting flaky. I began to wonder if I was going to have to drive into work to get these jobs done as they had to be done tonight. But I took care to use the ole apple S key quite frequently and especially before changing an items size. On the first art charge I ended up having to reboot after everything flaked out big time toward the end when I tried to resize it. It brought up the MOVE dialogue box and would not let me dismiss it. I also needed to load up a portfolio program which only runs in 9 and so rather than loading "Classic Mode" which takes forever I switched the startup disk over to System 9 and rebooted after the machine came up. In 9 (and I experienced this before) you cannot double click on a drive ICON. You can do it but the ICON only flashes and does not open. But if you select the drive ICON and choose OPEN from the FILE menu it will open the drives window and show you the directory. Same with opening a file. When I found the portfolio file I wanted to open I had to open it the same way. Well I found the art I was looking for opened it in Illustrator 10 and saved it into my work folder. I then rebooted back into OS 10 and finished with the first art charge. I then worked on the 2nd and 3rd with very little incident except that when it is not working right there are a few other things I notice. Such as APPLE SPACE BAR to get the grabber hand doesn't work. Neither does the SHIFT key to draw a straight line or the OPTION key to make a circle draw from the center out. The SHIFT key does not force a perfectly square box or round circle either. I managed to limp along without these niceties. On my last art charge however, I of course accidentally did an APPLE SPACEBAR out of habit and it WORKED!!! Now the SHIFT and OPTION keys work properly too. So for what its worth it seems to have improved as it warmed up. Now I can say that before I started having these problems I never shut the machine down. I always left it on and let it go to sleep. But of course these last couple of days I have been shutting it down at night and during the day.

So do I go back to leaving it running all the time with the case open?

What is likely to be the real problem?

I just want my machine to go back to working normal like it used to.

Thanks for any help.

[Link]

Originally posted by PowerMacMan:
It's hard to tell if heat is your problem.

The QuickSilver case has the stupidest and least effective airflow system of any Apple case I have ever seen. The main case fan does next to nothing other than humm really loud.

When I overclock my GigaDesigns Dual processor upgrade to 1.47GHz, the system will crash after about 10 minutes of 100% CPU use. If I leave the door open, it will take hours to crash. So, leaving the door open actually allows much better airflow.

What I can suggest is that you leave the door of your G4 open and perform the tasks that normally cause problems, see if heat is indeed your problem.

I am about an inch away from doing an ATX conversion into an aluminum Kingwin case. It is a rather simple task now that Kingwin, CoolerMaster and Lian Li cases have Mac-ATX board mounts drilled in them. You no longer have to drill the holes yourself.

Oh god, I'm MORE than tempted to do the same. Since I always leave stuff (or seti/rc5) open when I'm not using the comp, the damn thing always sounds like a hair dryer on medium. lol...

You're kidding though.. they put macatx on them?! AWESOME! This is going to be one of the first things on my list to do once I get some more ram

[TheDigitalMan]

O.K. last night after completing my 4 art charges and having everything running so nicely after things apparently warmed up I decided to leave it on and see how it did. I left it on all night and all day today while I was gone to work. I left a box fan blowing on it set on low speed. When I got home tonight it was asleep of course. I woke it up and went to work.

I had 2 art charges and near completing the second one it freaked out on me. Thank goodness I had just performed a save. I saved and then reduced the artwork down to 5" in width. The move dialogue box appeared (The normal thing) and of course I could not dismiss it or choose anything in it. I had to force quit Illustrator and then the force quit ap seemed to freak and quit everything including the finder. After rebooting everything seemed O.K. I reloaded Illustrator, reloaded my artwork. Everything was intact except the reduction in art. I selected all and succesfully reduced it. finished up and uploaded everything onto my FTP site.

Now I am back here seeking sage advice. Apparently it is random and the cooling doesn't seem to affect it much one way or the other. Where should I start looking? What should I be checking and testing? Are there diagnostic tools I should be purchasing? For what it's worth I am probably woefully lacking in that department. But open and willing to listen.

Thanks

[Link]

If you're still under applecare warranty (none of the DP800s expire until ~august) then you need to take that thing in.

I'm begining to think it's either bad ram or a bad processor.... the way things are randomly screwing up like that is not normal behavior, even for a machine with not enough ram (and this doesn't sound like the case).

You also have to keep in mind that even though Apple skimped out on the cooling system, most of the dual CPU QSes I've seen have delta fans for a reason, and were probably tested to at least run with no SERIOUS problems.... well as long as you use a stock configuration

If anything, the first thing to do now is to run a hardware test, and if you're out of warranty or really don't want to take the machine in, cycle through your ram sticks (first try only using 2, then another combination of two, then another) and if it still persists going down to 1 stick, and seeing if any of the sticks are bad... I have a feeling this is where the problem lies.

If the problem still persists, then taking in the machine for a bit of run through might be a good idea, and if you're running the apple hardware test you might want to try starting the test in loop mode and letting it run a few times by hitting command L before (or during? not sure) a normal test.

Anyway, best of luck with this, and if you still have problems or questions do ask them