[cutlassvillager]

My parents have a Quicksilver PowerMac G4 (867Mhz) running Mac OS 10.5.6. They have been having problems with the computer lately. Firefox is unexpectedly quitting often, time machine backups take a long time, the computer seems to be acting slow and many software updates get errors after they are done downloading (through software update). I also tried downloading the Mac OS 10.5.7 combo update, which failed verification when opening. These all seem to be symptoms of a hard drive failing. I have repaired disk permissions and verified the disk through disk utility with no problems. They have SMART reporter running and doesn't give any errors, but then I downloaded SMART utility which gave back two errors. I took a screen shot of the errors reported in SMART utility. Could these errors be causing the problems? Do I need to get a new hard drive?

[reader50]

Those HD parameters do not seem very suspicious to me. I'd be much more suspicious of a RAM stick failing. Boot to the Apple Hardware Test and run the extended memory test. See if it finds anything.

ps - run the other tests too, just in case. A failing HD would most likely show other symptoms. Failed checksums can also trace to bad RAM, failing CPU, or a really unstable network connection.