I have a Beige minitower which has a mean time between failure of about two days. When I boot it up, it will lock up, often in less than a day, but certainly within a week.
The OS installed is 10.2.8. The machine is usually asleep when it locks up, so the most common form of the freeze is an inability to wake up. However, if I turn off power saver and just use the screen saver function (I like the pretty colored lines in interesting arrangements) then when I return and turn on the LCD panel, the screen saver will be frozen in one configuration rather than constantly changing the arrangements of colored lines.
The other day, it actually bombed in the middle of use. I was copying some photos from memory card to hard drive and all the drives on the desktop disappeared (iTunes was still showing) and the cursor went to spinning beach ball. I turned off the monitor and went away for a day. When I came back 24 hours later the ball was still spinning.
When it locks up like this, none of the keyboard options work, and the power button the front of the machine does not work either. I must turn it off at the power strip.
This is not my main machine. This machine is only used as an iTunes server for the Sound Bridges (by Roku) on the home network and as a station for copying and archiving digital photos. There are two PCI cards, an Acard 6280M and some flavor of USB2 card.
I want to continue using 10.2.8 because I do not want to mess with Xpostfacto, and because IIRC, later versions of X would require me to update to later versions of iTunes and there was some reason I wanted to stay with the version I'm using (4.7, 4.07? something like that).
So some ideas I had as to the possible cause are:
1) There is an Apple tech note on an actual problem with Jaguar and the Beige G3 and a patch which is meant to solve it. However, the note states that after a certain release one doesn't need to implement the patch, and my release is at least that late. Does one need to do the modificaiton even if one has the later release? Some times notes are wrong when they state that a late release has fixed a problem.
2) I suppose my CPU could be overheating somehow, but it has fresh heat sink grease and the heat sink clip is not backwards, etc. etc. Also, I expect that the crashes would not be so spread out over time if that were the case.
3) Bad RAM? I think I have a single 256 MB DIMM installed. But I've tested the thing pretty extensively and it seems okay. I guess i could trade it for another one.
4) Long ATA cable. In order to use the Acard in Beige, I had to use a longer-than-18" ATA cable. I bought a good cable by Cables Unlimited (not the cheapest stuff available), but anything longer than 18" is technically out of spec. On the other hand *everyone* uses longer cables without issues and I have never noticed any corrupted files. Also, once, suspecting this was the issue, I completely reinstalled the OS, without noticable effect on the problem.
5) This one is farfetched, but it seems a little bit like the problem is more pronounced when my main machine running OS 9.1 is also powered up. They're both on the same network, so something could be going on through the network interfaces... I think the thing that really made me aware of this is that a couple of times freeze ups have happened when I was copying from a memory card in the reader on the Beige over the network to the archive drive on the OS 9.1 machine.
So guesses or votes as to the root cause of the problem? Has anyone else had similar issues with a Beige and 10.2.8 which you solved?
The OS installed is 10.2.8. The machine is usually asleep when it locks up, so the most common form of the freeze is an inability to wake up. However, if I turn off power saver and just use the screen saver function (I like the pretty colored lines in interesting arrangements) then when I return and turn on the LCD panel, the screen saver will be frozen in one configuration rather than constantly changing the arrangements of colored lines.
The other day, it actually bombed in the middle of use. I was copying some photos from memory card to hard drive and all the drives on the desktop disappeared (iTunes was still showing) and the cursor went to spinning beach ball. I turned off the monitor and went away for a day. When I came back 24 hours later the ball was still spinning.
When it locks up like this, none of the keyboard options work, and the power button the front of the machine does not work either. I must turn it off at the power strip.
This is not my main machine. This machine is only used as an iTunes server for the Sound Bridges (by Roku) on the home network and as a station for copying and archiving digital photos. There are two PCI cards, an Acard 6280M and some flavor of USB2 card.
I want to continue using 10.2.8 because I do not want to mess with Xpostfacto, and because IIRC, later versions of X would require me to update to later versions of iTunes and there was some reason I wanted to stay with the version I'm using (4.7, 4.07? something like that).
So some ideas I had as to the possible cause are:
1) There is an Apple tech note on an actual problem with Jaguar and the Beige G3 and a patch which is meant to solve it. However, the note states that after a certain release one doesn't need to implement the patch, and my release is at least that late. Does one need to do the modificaiton even if one has the later release? Some times notes are wrong when they state that a late release has fixed a problem.
2) I suppose my CPU could be overheating somehow, but it has fresh heat sink grease and the heat sink clip is not backwards, etc. etc. Also, I expect that the crashes would not be so spread out over time if that were the case.
3) Bad RAM? I think I have a single 256 MB DIMM installed. But I've tested the thing pretty extensively and it seems okay. I guess i could trade it for another one.
4) Long ATA cable. In order to use the Acard in Beige, I had to use a longer-than-18" ATA cable. I bought a good cable by Cables Unlimited (not the cheapest stuff available), but anything longer than 18" is technically out of spec. On the other hand *everyone* uses longer cables without issues and I have never noticed any corrupted files. Also, once, suspecting this was the issue, I completely reinstalled the OS, without noticable effect on the problem.
5) This one is farfetched, but it seems a little bit like the problem is more pronounced when my main machine running OS 9.1 is also powered up. They're both on the same network, so something could be going on through the network interfaces... I think the thing that really made me aware of this is that a couple of times freeze ups have happened when I was copying from a memory card in the reader on the Beige over the network to the archive drive on the OS 9.1 machine.
So guesses or votes as to the root cause of the problem? Has anyone else had similar issues with a Beige and 10.2.8 which you solved?
