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You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Mac Desktops > Freezing up iMac

Freezing up iMac
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Harvey
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Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Dracut, MA, USA
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Dec 21, 2015, 01:33 PM
 
My late 2013 iMac 21.5 is freezing up to a black screen more and more often. I do have a cursor but nothing is clickable. My only recourse is to restart with the back button. Is this something to do with my backlighting or motherboard? Would a clean install of El Capitan be a fix. I use my iMac mostly with Adobe products like LR and Photoshop. Very frustrating. My last iMac lasted also 8 years.
     
reader50
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Dec 21, 2015, 02:32 PM
 
Does the cursor show normal brightness, or is it faded too? If it looks normal, the backlight is fine.

Create a fresh user account, and spend some time in it. See if the problem happens there too. If it doesn't happen - then your hardware is fine, the problem is somewhere in software. If you have a spare drive, you can do a fresh install to that first, without doing anything drastic with your main install. Again, spend some time in the alt drive's fresh install to see if the problem recurs.

From your description, I'm thinking about GPU issues. But there isn't enough data to point the finger.
     
Harvey  (op)
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Dec 21, 2015, 04:09 PM
 
Just got back to my iMac to find it in a state of blackness (as if asleep). Discouraged I unglued the 3 USB drive and pressed the keyboard (no particular key) and it woke up to my screen as I had left it an hour ago. Could it be my 3 USB external drives? As to your question.....no the cursor remains the same.By the way I did do an option/command/P/R about an hour ago as well. Thanks for your input.
     
Harvey  (op)
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Dec 21, 2015, 04:10 PM
 
not unglued . . . . .disconnected is better.
     
pottymouth
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Dec 23, 2015, 12:23 PM
 
Definitely not a display problem. It sounds to me like it's either crashing while going to sleep or coming out of sleep. If that's the case, those hard drives and any other external peripherals would be my first suspects. Try living without them connected, if you can. If you get no crashes with them disconnected, plug them back in one at a time to figure out which is the troublemaker.

If sleep really is the problem, you might also try changing your energy settings to come on sooner, to make testing/troubleshooting quicker. You can set it to sleep as quickly as 1 minute.
     
   
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