Trouble with Mom's eMac - freezes with huge pixelated image on screen

[pinkoos]

My mom told me that the last few days her eMac has been freezing randomly and becomes completely unresponsive. A hard reboot fixes the problem for usually just a few minutes and then it happens again.

When I was over there last night for dinner, I tried a few things:

-repaired permissions (but couldn't repair disk since I had no way of booting it from anything other than the boot drive)

-tried downloading a free antivirus program (Clamxav), but couldn't get it to the point of starting a scan b/c the Mac would freeze

That's about it. Couldn't do much else b/c we had to get the kids home to bed. So, I didn't have time to create a clean user account and see if the problems persisted within the newly created account. I may be able to get there this weekend and try again, though.

One weird thing is that sometimes when it would freeze, it would freeze with a huge pixelated image taking up the whole screen. The first time, it looked kinda like a radioactive or biohazard symbol and the second time it looked like a bunny or smiley face.

Obviously, I'm wondering about some kind of virus, but I'm not sure.

Anybody have any ideas?

Thanks.

[bazookaman]

nuke and pave.

[rgG]

Hope you get it fixed, but I did have to LOL at the description of the images that it leaves.

it looked kinda like a radioactive or biohazard symbol and the second time it looked like a bunny or smiley face.

[pinkoos]

rgG wrote:
Hope you get it fixed, but I did have to LOL at the description of the images that it leaves.

it looked kinda like a radioactive or biohazard symbol and the second time it looked like a bunny or smiley face.

Yeah, actually kinda freaked me out in a Monty Python sort of way.

My mom may have a used iMac in her future. The eMac was always pretty dog slow.

[N-OS X-tasy!]

bazookaman wrote:
nuke and pave.

Agreed.

IIRC, certain models of the eMac experienced faulty video adapters. Your mom's may be failing.

[Ted King]

It might be a Ram problem. If there is more than one stick of Ram in the eMac, you can leave one in at a time and see if the problem goes away. You can try pulling the Ram out and reseating it first, just in case a Ram stick has somehow worked loose.

[pinkoos]

Ted King wrote:
It might be a Ram problem. If there is more than one stick of Ram in the eMac, you can leave one in at a time and see if the problem goes away. You can try pulling the Ram out and reseating it first, just in case a Ram stick has somehow worked loose.

It's got 512MB RAM (yes, MB!). Two 256MB sticks. Rather than messing with all this troubleshooting, I may just take the hit and get her a used iMac.

Forgot to mention the specs: 1.25GHz G4, 512MB RAM, 40GB hard drive, combo drive, heavy as all heck.

[haikuman]

The Lope had to occasionally drop his from about 12" to 18"" to get it to work properly ... *(:>*
Rudie

[MikeF]

Certain versions of eMacs also had the bad capacitors.

[bazookaman]

I recently switched out an emac for a newer 21 inch imac. the lady was ecstatic to say the least.