i inherited a 1.6GHz Power Mac G5 and decided to make use of it as a server of sorts. Home network file serving, light FTP, nothing too crazy.

I received the machine as bone stock as the day it was born. 1.6GHz single-cpu, 256MB RAM, 80GB hard drive, and OS X 10.3.9. My brother's data was still on the 80GB original hard drive, so I simply replaced it with a Western Digital 750GB SATA drive. While I was at it, I also swapped the two 128MB memory modules for a couple 1GB sticks and upgraded the "SuperDrive."

The new 750GB was christened with a new install of Leopard and that's where things went south. Any amount of normal use will eventually result in the mouse/video freezing. If the computer is sitting serving files, it can seemingly run forever. Once I start doing something like web browsing on it, the computer will always crash to the point I have to hold the power button to shut it down.

At first I thought Firefox 2.0.0.9 was to blame, but then it froze while working in Safari and once while transitioning from one Spaces desktop to another.

My initial though was that I have bad RAM. However, I was transferring data from a USB hard drive during one of the freezes and, although the screen was stuck, the transfer seemed to still be going along fine. Could it be the video card is somehow to blame? It's the stock 64MB nVidia model that seem to work fine in the older OS.

This is my first major leap into Apple computing, so I have to admit I'm a little clumsy when it comes to moving around the OS. I can't really find anything that can diagnose my problem. Are there any utilities available in the OS, or something I can download? Any known compatibility issues with something I've installed? Should I attempt to reinstall the OS? Any ideas?

Thanks.

Since it may still be alive when the GUI freezes, enabling SSH and logging into it remotely will be one of the quicker ways to find out what is going on. To do so, open System Preferences, go to Sharing, and check Remote Login.

Next time it does this, ssh in, and try to do "sudo dmesg" to get the kernel log. The last lines may reveal something useful. You can also do "ps aux" to list all running processes, and try to find if something is hung. Once rebooted, in the Utilities folder is an application called Console. You can use that to look at system logs, and see if anything relevant is being saved out to the logs on disk.

Also, if you want to give the hardware a test, the system should have a set of restore discs. Put in the first one (if there are multiples), and reboot holding the alt/option key. A boot menu should appear, and one of the options should be a hardware test.

I'm going to induce a freeze when I get home later (about 12 hours from now), so don't think I'm ignoring this suggestion. I will post the results here.

I also want to say that I find it annoying that Apple Remote Desktop appears to be VNC-based, but you can't access it with a generic VNC client. Some say that OSXvnc is buggy, but it seem like the most popular option. Does anyone use that or know of a way to use ARD with a standard VNC viewer?

I've got a bunch of headless G5 Xserves and originally I had to run OSXvnc, it's not too bad. We then bought a copy of ARD to use and after upgrading the ARD servers to version 3 the VNC problems went away so we removed OSXvnc and just used ordinary ARD/VNC. One word of warning though, I've found the VNC server to be rather flakey requiring a login over ssh to manually restart the process.

After reading a bit, it seems like OS X 10.5 allows VNC viewers to connect by ticking an option in the ARD config. I will have to take a look later. Apparently this is a new feature.

Nope, it's been that way for ages. Like Andy said, though, it's flaky. Maybe it's been fixed. I haven't updated my OS recently.

I have no experience with it, but Memtest OS X showed up in a quick Google.

rember, it diagnosed a faulty memory module in my old iBook.

I got it to freeze while logged in via SSH. The session died and my constant pinging was no longer being answered. So, it's probably not a video problem. I'm running rember now, but I have no idea how long one pass will take.

Machine froze during the first pass of rember. That could be telling. I didn't have the log screen up when it froze, so I don't know what might have happened. Running again now.

UPDATE: It froze during the 2nd test. I let the machine sit there with the frozen screen for a while. After about 2 minutes, the fans started ramping-up speed. I shut it down and will be investigating my memory options tomorrow. Good night.

That crossed my mind, but the fans don't spin at an accelerated rate before the computer crashes.

I ran the machine with the side panel off for a bit earlier in the week (leaving the plastic air guide/shield in place). All fans were spinning nicely.

I need to get the G5 up and running since I sold my Windows RAID server over the weekend. Throwing more memory at it seems like my best option right now. Since it's just DDR, there are a lot of other places it can be used if it turns out the memory in the machine is fine.

The good news is that the VNC server built in to 10.5 appears to work nicely.

That's a good idea. I don't have a computer at home with a 184-pin DDR slot, so I will have to snag something from work.

I already ordered memory, so the test won't save me that expense. But, it should be interesting to see the results and let me know which stick to return.

I wonder why nobody makes a motherboard with memtest86 or equiv in flash. We're already getting things like web browsers and DVD players built in...

We are?

If you have a second mac around, 2 kernel debugging may be your friend, if the machine really is panicing.

Cool. I have that same motherboard for my Myth box. I never noticed the memtest feature.

I do have another Mac here, but I already reloaded OS X on the G5 and it seems to be working fine now. I'm still not sure what went wrong.

I'm sorry if nobody cares, but the G5 froze again last night after running for a couple days without an issue. Somehow, through much googleing, I came across this info. I know I looked for firmware updates for this thing, but I was only able to find updates pertaining to the 1.8GHz G5 through Apple's search engine.

I will load this firmware tonight, but I don't know why that couldn't have been done automatically. Since there are so few possible Apple configurations relative to a PC, couldn't the OS automatically update the firmware without much trouble? Abit motherboards can do this from within Windows.

I'm seeing posts on forums from a while ago about Logitech mice freezing OS X. I assume this is only if using the Logitech software. Does anyone have more info on this? I have a Logitech mouse hooked up, but I'm not using any driver other than what's built in to OS X. I have an Apple Pro Mouse around, but that is the worst mouse I have ever used. I can imagine the original iMac puck is worse, but I've never even touched one.

I also have a D-Link USB Bluetooth dongle hooked up that I'm wary of. If the firmware doesn't help, I'll have to start auditing all my hardware or maybe downgrade to Tiger.

Wasn't there a problem with some Macs around the G5 time because of bad caps?

I'm not using Logitech software. No third-party drivers are loaded for any hardware, and the OS install is fresh (not an upgrade).