[antizero]

I have an iMac G4 1.25GHz and I've never had any trouble with it. Today when I turned it on, it took a couple of minutes to boot up, and then the dock never worked. Every time I mouse over the dock, I get the little "waiting circle". I looked at the Activity Monitor, and the dock is using 75-90% of the CPU. Obviously, it's running SO bogged down because of the Dock's processor consumption.

Help!!!

[theolein]

Reboot and run disk utility.

[Anubis IV]

Also, look in the Activity Monitor to confirm that it is indeed the Dock that is eating up the CPU cycles.

[larkost]

Also, are you running any haxies? These often run under the finder or the dock, and if something goes wrong you can't usually troubleshoot them separately. A great reason not to run them.

[jamil5454]

OS X may be dying, but not your Mac. Please, don't do what all those ignorant windows users out there do and just throw away the computer when a simple reformat will fix it! This happens all too often.

[Big Mac]

It may actually be your RAM that has gone bad, believe it or not. I had very similar symptoms on my iBook one time. Processor utilization as reported by top was never above 5%, and everything was excruciatingly slow. I rebooted and attempted fsck -y in single user mode, but fsck was taking so long to do anything (after it took a million years to boot into single user mode), I decided just to turn my Mac off. It occurred to me that it could be the RAM, and that if it was not I would have serious problems to contend with. It turns out that the generic, although not super-cheap RAM I had in my machine for years was bad, and everything was back to normal once I installed a replacement module. So, take out any third party RAM you have and boot again to see if it brings the computer back to nearly normal operation. It will be slower than normal because of the absence of the extra RAM, but it should be a lot faster than it was while the defective RAM was installed. That's just my thought.