iMac 20" keeps freezing!

maybe i'm overreacting here, but the beautiful iMac that i bought saturday night has frozen twice, to the point where i had to disconnect my surge protector. also, firefox, which i downloaded the first night, has frozen once. i had to force-quit the browser. i've only been using the computer three days!

i bought the imac at an apple store here in the DC region. i upgraded, in the store, to 1 GB RAM (mostly because i wanted the faster speed that night; soon i'll upgrade to 2 GB and sell the 512s on eBay or craigslist). do you think the employee didn't correctly load the RAM? or is it common for Macs to periodically freeze? i just think that twice in three days (plus the issue with firefox) is a bit much for a brand new machine...(other than that issue, i LOVE the computer. i'm so glad that i switched from my five-year-old clunky PC)

any and all help is much appreciated!

inkjs said:

...iMac that i bought saturday night has frozen twice...

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I have same machine as you and its been a rock from minute one. (I also use Firefox once in a while.) Something is certainly wrong with your unit.

New machine? Bought from Apple Store? Put it in the box and take it back and let them deal with it.

Brand new? Take it back, get a shiny new one

Yeah, the whole machine should basically never freeze up completely like that- dodgy RAM is usually the culprit.

You could pop in the first disc that came with your mac and hold down the 'd' key whilst rebooting.

Start the extended hardware test that completely checks all ram sectors and see if any errors show up.

great advice. thanks to you all. i'll try the hardware test tonight, but will also call the apple store to complain. luckily, i live near several stores so it's not too much of a hassle to return it for another one. and it's good to know that the machine doesn't generally completely freeze. even my old PC wouldn't regularly freeze like that, not unless i was running photoshop, itunes and other memory intensive apps at the same time.

I'm having similar problems. I am going to do the hardware test right now. I will call MacMall in the morning.

geeknik said:

I'm having similar problems. I am going to do the hardware test right now. I will call MacMall in the morning.

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You bought at MacMall? Uh oh. My boss tried to return his 12" PB from them and they wouldn't take it back. Something about being a reseller - told him to take it up with Apple. If yours is defective I hope they will help you. neye:

Is there any particular reason you are using Firefox?

While the best browser on Windows and Linux, I find it to be pretty lame on OS X. Doesn't look or act as a Mac program should (though they are working on it, it's not the top priority right now)

Safari works well enough, and doesn't have the security problems of IE.

If you like the way that Firefox renders pages, Camino is based on the Gecko rendering engine (the same one as Firefox, so sites work the same), but looks like a pretty Mac program and integrates with the system much better.

In over a year of Mac ownership, now with 2 iMacs in the household, I have never had one lock up. I have had programs, even the Finder lock up, but hitting Command+Option+Esc (=ctrl+alt+del in Win), I can kill the pesky program.

I agree with the others, the whole system locking up does sound like a faulty RAM problem. Since you live near Apple stores, they should take care of you.

I had the same issues, make sure your updates are up to date. After I did that it was Smoooooth Sailing. ****

deus_ex_machina said:

You bought at MacMall? Uh oh. My boss tried to return his 12" PB from them and they wouldn't take it back. Something about being a reseller - told him to take it up with Apple. If yours is defective I hope they will help you. neye:

Click to expand...

I talked to them this morning and they did mention that they wouldn't accept the return on the computer but would return the ram they used to upgrade it with. I am hoping that when switching back to the stock ram my problems will cease and they can just replace my ram. If not I hope that Apple would be good enough to help me out seeing that I can't get any help from MacMall.

SORRY to the author of this post. I don't mean to hijack your thread but we are having VERY similar issues. I just got mine 3 days ago as well.

geeknik said:

I talked to them this morning and they did mention that they wouldn't accept the return on the computer but would return the ram they used to upgrade it with. I am hoping that when switching back to the stock ram my problems will cease and they can just replace my ram. If not I hope that Apple would be good enough to help me out seeing that I can't get any help from MacMall.

SORRY to the author of this post. I don't mean to hijack your thread but we are having VERY similar issues. I just got mine 3 days ago as well.

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lol! no problem. i've learned after reading through this forum and the ones on apple's site that so many of us newbies are having the same problems. i hope that yours get fixed with the stock RAM.

my problems have ceased. or rather, my computer hasn't frozen since tuesday night. so i've gone two days with no issues. i ran the diagnostic test but it found no problems. so maybe it's not the RAM? or maybe the test failed to detect what's wrong? i'm going to take it in to a nearby apple store to be safe.

also, the reason i love firefox and prefer it over other browers is because of the tabbed browsing. i'm constantly opening up new screens. does camino do that? either way, you're right -- i should just stay away from firefox on my mac. bummer. i've really enjoyed using safari, too...

thanks for your help!

Hey, Thanks for understanding. I just pulled the 2gb ram they installed out and put in the original 512. So far so good but it may take a good day or so before I can really tell. It usually has to sit for a while before I can see the problems.

I am using camino right now and it is A LOT like firefox...only it looks better on the mac. You can get firefox with grapple uno theme and firefoxy and it looks pretty good though.

Keep your fingers crossed for me and I will do the same for you!

Thanks
Ed

When I received my new 20" iMac in the mail (from Apple.com), the Superdrive was not working. The guy I spoke with Applecare said that if anything goes wrong, it is usually just after getting it. In my case, the Apple store replaced the drive and it now runs beautifully. I had a slight hang after installing an application, but it was due to some bad permissions which Disk Utility fixed.

Note to switchers: Disk Utility has to be one of the best built-in applications I have seen. There is not an analogous application in XP - you really have to use a third party utility to accomplish the same task. Kudos to Apple

Just a little update on my progress. After putting the original 512mb...I had a freeze up and wasn't able to force quit. So I called macmall tech support back and the guy told me that the new imacs have this problem and you need to reset the SMC so he asked me to unplug everything from my computer and let it sit for a couple of minutes (which I had to do in order to uninstall my upgraded ram). He then told me I should be good to go... sounds like BS to me. What do you guys think???

It has been an hour with no problems...in the shortrun this appears to have worked. inkjs,,,here is a link see if it helps you.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303446

wow, what a mess! thanks for the info, ed. i'm going to call applecare this evening to tell them of my problems earlier in the week. i wonder whether resetting the SMC is something i should hold off on doing until my imac freezes again....

thanks again!
jamie

sheeez...as I was typing a reply to this my computer just automatically shut down. So I don't know. I just reset the pram...whatever that may do. My next option I guess it to reinstall OSX and start clean. I will let the tech support guys tell me what. Good luck.

inkjs said:

[snip]also, the reason i love firefox and prefer it over other browers is because of the tabbed browsing. i'm constantly opening up new screens. does camino do that? either way, you're right -- i should just stay away from firefox on my mac. bummer. i've really enjoyed using safari, too...[/snip]

thanks for your help!

Click to expand...

Though your other issues are more important, I thought I should comment on the tabbed browsing...

There is not one single browser I have ever found on the Mac that does NOT support tabbed browsing, excluding ms IE. Safari supports tabbed browsing, you just may have to turn it on. Go to Safari -> Preferences click on the "Tabs" section, and check "Enable Tabbed Browsing". While there, I recommend checking off the "Always Show Tab Bar" option. Why Safari (and many other browsers on many other platforms) do not enable tabbed browsing by default is beyond me.

For Camino, it should have tabbed browsing on by default. You can go the the prefs and choose to always show the tab bar. On both browsers (pretty much every Mac browser I have used also), command+t opens a new tab.

I am downloading Camino now to try it out.

thanks! i downloaded camino last night, tried to open a new screen and was excited to see it supports tabbed browsing. i dragged firefox to the trash. i didn't realize that safari also supports it. thanks for the instructions on how to enable it...

anyhow, after several days of my machine not freezing, here's what happened: last night i went to the little apple on the top left corner, clicked "shut down," and my machine froze. nothing. the cursor was stationary. the dock disappeared but nothing happened. i turned it off by holding the power button for a few seconds. then i rebooted. a couple of minutes later, i shut it down. it shut down without freezing.

very strange. i've called apple and they suggest i take it in for them to look at. i'm going to do that tomorrow...