RAM Issues

[haasprint]

Does anyone know of a way you can check to see if there is a problem with your computers RAM. I bought a new G5 back in June and it has never run as advertised. I have worked with Apple Care and done all the tests for the system and everything checks out fine. But those tests don't check RAM. They seem to think it's RAM.

[prepress_brillance_43]

How much RAM are you working with? HOw many programs are you running at the same time? What version OSX are you using? Are you on PC? What did the advertisment say it would run like?.. some more details may help others help you.

I found this...

http://www.adventnet.com/products/qe...tml?adwords135


...there are a few products like this, just search "testing you computers RAM" on any of the major search engines......

[haasprint]

I have 2.4Gb. My operating system is Tiger 10.4.2. I run maybe 3 programs at once.

[Sally]

Any chance there is another computer you could swap the ramm with? That might be as good an indication as anything. I recently bout a 512chip for my dad's home PC. On installation it wouldn't even boot up. My sister, upon hearing I was upgrading his ramm, also bought herself a similar chip. She ended up taking the chip that wouldn't work in his computer, giving me the one she bought. And now the ramm is working fine in both computers. 8O
picky picky!

[almaink]

I have 2.4Gb.? Ram in a G5 has to be installed in pairs. Also Apple has provided a Hardware test disk with your G5, use it to check your ram. What type of issues are you having anyway? Have you repaired permissions and ran fsck -fy?

[NutCase]

You can buy RAM from a company such as ramjet.com and take out the apple ram to see if that makes things better. At the very least you'll have more ram for when you fix the problem

If it does solve the problem, try and get apple to give you new ram (but don't leave the 3rd party ram installed or they will remove it, say that was the cause of the problem, and not fix anything). Tell them you pulled RAM from another powermac g5 and that it fixed your problem

You can also try running Memtest for OS X. This app seems to provide a graphical front end to memtest but I don't think it's as up to date as the other program.

If you have other devices connected to your machine (USB devices, PCI cards), they might be causing issues as well.

If you installed quark 6 into your applications folder and never repaired permissions after, that could also be causing you problems.

[haasprint]

The computer acts as if it's chugging away on information even when it's idle. When you choose to open an app., print, or some times just open folders you get the spinning rainbow for 10-20 secs before it proceeds. Has frequent app. and system crashes. Was shutting down on its own Sat. even with energy saver controls set to never auto shutdown. Just yesterday I chose shut down and instead of doing so it put dropped out black type all over screen. Some of the verbage was about "system debugger", cpu, kernal and some other technical garbage.

[NutCase]

did you import settings or prefs from another machine and maybe those are causing problems? Try a reinstall? (Not archive and install)

If you have 10.4, check the activity viewer and see if a process called mds or mdimoport are busy sucking up all your cpu cycles. Those are spotlight related items and you might be having trouble with that if you have a bunch of server volumes or other things mounted. Need to tell spotlight to leave those alone.

Have you tried dumping all your caches, including spotlight related data and waiting until spotlight has finished indexing your HD before using the computer?

It does sound as if something is really messed up on your machine so a reformat, reinstall, wait for spotlight to finish indexing, and then starting to reinstall your software seems like the only possible solution at this point although I wonder if that would even help.

Are there any clues in the console or system log as to what process might be causing all the problems?

[David]

Try creating a new admin user and see if the same problems exist for it also. It could be a corrupted user pref in the account you are currently using.

My .02
David

[almaink]

Did remove the protective film from the inside cover when you installed the G5? I think if you run the Hardware test you'll get an answer. Although if you didn't repair permissions or run fsck -fy that could also be an issue.