Imac freezes while playing world of warcraft

I have an Imac OS x 10.5.8 with an Gforce 8800 vid card. I have been playing wow since the day I received my Imac and it has run flawlessly. Yesterday it started to freeze up and lock my system. It happens everytime I plat wow now and the only way out is to hard boot. Everything else works fine and this only happens if I play wow and it happen within the first 5 - 10 min.

Any ideas why this would be happening now and what I can do to fix it. I need my daily wow fix.

Thanks

The first thing I think I'd check is the drive space. If you are very short on space, then perhaps you have caching issues. If you aren't short on space and everything else works fine, I would consider deleting everything related to WoW and reinstall it from scratch. There's just no telling if something like an add-on got corrupt, or if the latest update went awry, etc.

It may be just as lifeisabeach said, running out of harddrive space or running too many apps while playing WoW can make it crash, but it wouldn't take your whole system down usually.

One thing that can be a problem is overheating, especially if you had had your computer for a while and it accumulated dust. When you work in regular apps the CPU and GPU are not operating to the max of their potential, therefore the fans handle it. And after running 5-10 minutes of a high-demanding game like WoW your system may freeze and need a reboot if it overheats.

I haven't had this problem on a Mac, but this used to happen on the old PC I played WoW on. Install something to track CPU, HDD and GPU temperatures and check them after running WoW for a couple of minutes. If they are too high, you might need a service done on your PC to literally Clean it up.

I have a new iMac and mine has frozen a couple of times only with WoW. I have no issues with space on mine (1tb barely taken up a gig lol), but I don't know why it did that. I started keeping it in windowed mode (since I only got a couple freezes in full screen), and haven't had issues since. Still really haven't a clue. I assumed it was fault with the program itself since I haven't had anything else freeze like that.

I definitely do not have a space issue I am only using about 20% of my available space. It crashed yesterday while playing a youtube video. I am not sure about the heat thing, does anyone have a recommended program to track heat?

I just find the whole thing very frustrating, but I thank all of you for the input.

tubesteel said:

I definitely do not have a space issue I am only using about 20% of my available space. It crashed yesterday while playing a youtube video. I am not sure about the heat thing, does anyone have a recommended program to track heat?

I just find the whole thing very frustrating, but I thank all of you for the input.

Click to expand...

Here's one:
Temperature Monitor: Description

If this helps determine that heat isn't an issue, then one other thing I'd be curious about is your disk fragmentation level. Grab iDefrag and see what sort of stats it gives you (the demo version can do this without paying for it). It's a very long shot, but having had a drive that was 60% fragmented once and was causing video playback issues, it's worth checking out.