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Post by Sporlo on Jul 13, 2008 17:38:12 GMT
Even more interesting computer news! Will it ever stop? ... NO!And now I'm f*cking pissed because THIS time, it MAKES NO SENSE! (well, it's made no sense the whole time) The "not making sense" part totally destroys the good news that I finally figured out what's been making the computer slow. So, here I go on another long story about what I did and what happened... (not part of the story) This sucks, my desktop's 3 fans are running at 3250rpm, 2100, and 2000 (roughly), while my laptop's one fan may be 2800rpm, and the laptop will still be WAY louder than the desktop. And isn't it sad that when only iTunes and the Dashboard are open, the desktop's CPU is still using just over half of itself. And over half the RAM is being used as well. (random facts that I shared for no reason) Ok, so randomly in the morning, my brother tried to print a card with the printer. We have the HP Photosmart C4385 All-in-One printer. It also has 802.11g so we can put the printer anywhere in the house. The only cord you need is the power one. So I guess when he printed, it just refused to print, and hooray we have a slow computer again! Same EXACT symptoms as before. The app or whatever it is that pops up every time you print something gave this error: /user/libexec/cups/backend/hpip failed. iTunes had been playing in the background the whole time, and now it'd skip a half second every once in a while. I quit the printer queue and had the printer print itself some network tests. All fine. Then I turned off printer Wi-Fi. Ever so slightly the computer sped up a bit. It worked its way faster, and then I plugged the printer into the computer with USB. Tried printing the card again. Waited, and waited. Printer was still labeled as "Idle", so I quit the printer queue again. By this time the computer got slow AGAIN. Actually much slower this time. I finally managed to quit Print Explosion (the app the card was made in), and everything was quit and closed except iTunes (no window though), when suddenly, the printer started printing the card!! How many of these "wtf" moments have I had now? I was like "Come ON! Idiot computer! WTF are you doing? Stop doing random things!!!!" AFTER everything was quit it printed. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to print the INSIDE of the card, as I didn't save it. I'm thinking it was just so slow to print because the computer was just really backed up. So, for I think the first time, I was able to PREDICT that the computer would get fast again after all the printer stuff was quit. I was actually right. It's been a while and it is running at 100% speed. So: -100% sure hardware is not a problem -VERY sure that somehow the printer is causing the problems, AND that somehow my dad and I messing with VPN has something to do with it. Interesting how from the BEGINNING my dad and I had suspected that VPN/Airport had to do with this. Hold on, I'm not done, I'll come back and modify this in a few minutes. When my dad got an old laptop from work to use, he wasn't able to use VPN through the Airport Extreme router, because of a known but still extremely annoying problem with the product. It simply has issues with VPN. So VPN DOES work if you bypass the Airport and go straight to the cable/ethernet box. One time my dad was talking on the phone with a guy who apparently knew how to solve the Airport VPN problem, as in he's done it before. We were one step away from being done, when the router didn't show up in the Airport Utility for Windows on his laptop. Fatal error . It just wouldn't show up, end of discussion there's nothing we could do. So the guy later suggested resetting the Airport. I guess we could try that. Anyways while we were talking with him we were messing around with lots of Airport/network preferences, but I THOUGHT we reverted all've them. (the guy wasn't the most helpful person). A little after that was when the computer started getting slow. Plus, I'm pretty sure that's when our printer stopped working. Not sure though. That still doesn't leave me with much. Something we did with VPN/Airport/network now causes the printer to cause the computer to become slow? How's that supposed to work??? The computer's "moods" also confuse me. I don't understand why it gradually got slower in the past, then gradually got better, finally curing itself after I took out the hard drive. Perhaps we had the printer on the whole time and didn't realize it? (Wi-Fi turns on when you turn the printer on). Maybe the next step is to just uninstall all the drivers/other software, as well as reset Airport, and just start from the beginning. I bet all that was kinda hard to follow. It's hard to remember everything that's happened over the last month. I kinda just write whatever comes to mind.
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Post by CyberFox on Jul 13, 2008 17:53:23 GMT
formatting the computer allways saved me a lot of trouble. (first time? save your files if u wanna avoid a lot of pain ) edit: You should try using the enter button some more.
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Post by Sporlo on Jul 13, 2008 18:14:26 GMT
Yay I can post now since it won't be a double post. Edited post as well.
CyberFox, well I used to enter ALL THE TIME, and it looked really bad with like spaces everywhere, so now I don't as often.
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Post by technostick on Jul 13, 2008 20:18:48 GMT
So the adventure of the freezer was only a distraction? Awesome story in any case!
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Post by trace on Jul 13, 2008 22:04:30 GMT
Computers suck Am I right?
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Post by Lonestar on Jul 13, 2008 22:20:59 GMT
I can't explain this as a software problem, but I'm pretty sure it's frankly not possible as a hardware problem. If something was wrong, it'd be wrong all the time and there wouldn't need to "warm up" to run at full speed. I think you upgraded to Leopard? If you don't mind losing data, try wiping the drive and reinstalling Leopard or downgrading to Tiger. I would try downgrading to Tiger if possible, as the problems are happening in Leopard but didn't exist in Tiger. If it is a driver problem with your Airport and what it's connected to, maybe you can just turn off the Airport? If you can isolate it so you're sure it's an Airport problem, there might be a new driver you can download or if all else continues to fail you can revert to Tiger and see if Airport still causes problems.
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Post by Aayrl on Jul 15, 2008 22:45:57 GMT
Computers suck Am I right? Because God Hates you and you're Mexican. ~Aayrl
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Post by Sporlo on Jul 16, 2008 23:03:28 GMT
I know this is probably getting old by now, but I might as well relate the rest of this mess.
Software Update came up, and gave me this:
HP Printer Drivers Update, v1.1, 90.0 MB (Description) The HP Printer Driver Update includes the latest drivers for printers you have used on your system.
I got excited, because maybe that would fix the printer problem. I installed it on both computers. My brother said the laptop wouldn't print wirelessly, but it would wired. With the update, it then was able to print wirelessly.
On the desktop, I was still plagued with the usual slowness, and it said it couldn't communicate with the printer when I tried wirelessly printing. I deleted the wireless printer setup (leaving the wired and airport setups), and re-added it. It worked.
So printer functionality seems good now, but I don't know whether that update caused it, or if it's going to help the computer at all.
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Post by Sporlo on Apr 7, 2009 4:12:26 GMT
wow. I can't really tell if I gave you all a definitive ending to this ugly "mess" as I called it in the post above this. Well, fortunately, it's now working totally great again. (well, it has been since roughly the above post). It's essentially working as good as new, other than the fact that it's RELATIVELY slow compared to it's first day alive. I'm sure that's due to the installation of Leopard. Anyways, I'm here to announce another horrible computer adventure. This time... with the laptop!!!!!! It happened about 6+ months ago, but I never got around to telling you guys. I'll make another thread for it when I have the time to write it all out. It was just as frustrating as the desktop!
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Post by Pablo on Apr 7, 2009 11:38:57 GMT
Good to hear it works now.
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Post by PHAIL maan on Apr 7, 2009 13:51:53 GMT
Just saw this thread, don't know how much help I can be… When I have a Mac problem (and I've had quite a few), I check my Activity Monitor ("All Processes" shown in the Show popup) and its CPU and Disk Activity tabs. It can help me identify the problem. It's essentially working as good as new, other than the fact that it's RELATIVELY slow compared to it's first day alive. I'm sure that's due to the installation of Leopard. Leopard has higher requirements than Tiger so I would think it would be slower if the computer's specs are close to Leopard's. I also know that my iBook uses 100% CPU when printing, although that doesn't seem to be your problem.
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Post by Sporlo on Jun 6, 2009 1:29:54 GMT
Well, despite the fact that the Nvidia graphics upgrade in our new MacBook allows me to play MBO with no lag, it still has bugs. Look what happened after attempting to join a Think Tanks game one time. It suddenly froze, the screen would blink every once in a while, and the screen got all contorted. It looked like the screen was getting high or something. At one point there was this awesome radial pattern of all sorts of colors. The computer clock stopped, which is the indicator that there's a serious problem. I'm not sure if the computer was just stuck in a single frame, or the whole thing itself was frozen. It unfroze for about 30 seconds, and in that time I was able to get a screenshot of the screen:
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Post by Pablo on Jun 6, 2009 1:37:02 GMT
That's hilarious! I can think of many drugs your computer might be on.
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Post by ridley^2 on Jun 6, 2009 1:58:34 GMT
3 mostly posible causes for that (happens to me 24/7)
1: Lag 2: Lag 3: Something. (Lag)
Still, thats pretty funny. That stuff happens to me all the time when i try and open a program e.g. firefox.
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Post by Sporlo on Dec 6, 2009 21:10:42 GMT
Guess what, I think my iMac G5 is finally dead. It's had a long life, and it's even come back from the dead before, as I have described in this thread already. Assuming that it never fully starts up again, it will have been 4 years, 7 months, and 27 days old: April 9, 2005 - December 6, 2009. But don't worry, there's still a chance that it'll just decide to work one time and it'll start up and work perfectly for a little while. It likes to do that randomly and without warning. So yesterday morning, I hear from my brother/dad that "the computer's not working again." I don't get much more detail other than it won't start up all the way. That night, I checked it out. I turned on the computer, and the first thing I notice is that the blue screens that swipe down during startup were different in color as well as in number. This time there was even a black swipe-down screen between some blues. The next thing I noticed is that the question mark folder appeared before the Apple logo. The one that indicates that the computer can't find any startup volume or something. However immediately after it found something, because the Finder logo replaced the question mark and it continued to start up. After a much longer startup sequence, it finally loaded the menu bar and the pointer. But that was it. The rest of the desktop remained a shade of blue. Also, the menu bar was kind of fuzzy. Like a large number of pixels were not the right color. There were a lot of random green pixels all over the menu bar. In addition, the pointer was in the form of the rainbow spinner the whole time. Soon after, the screen really started to get whacky and there would be a sort of repeating sequence of random columns/frames/patterns of distortion. I really don't know how to describe it. Fortunately I decided to film a bit of this, and I'll post it in a little bit. I had no idea what was causing this, so I tried to rule out some possibilities. I put in my DiskWarrior disk because I knew if I could boot from that, I could see whether the hard drive was functioning properly. It was slow, but I managed to start up with DiskWarrior. It said everything was fine, and I was able to see the contents of the hard drive with the preview, so I knew that wasn't the problem. And now for the strange parts. After I ejected the disk, it started up fine! It made it all the way! At that point it seemed to be perfectly fine. Using this amazing opportunity, I proceeded to backup the whole computer with Time Machine to our external drive (the only reason I needed to do this is because a week ago I had erased the whole external drive because I was experimenting with different backup methods). Through the night, it managed to backup the whole thing successfully, and when I came down in the morning, my brother had it playing some Christmas music, so it was still working great. I tested Time Machine just to see that everything was in there. Time Machine has a pretty fancy animation when scrolling through windows (the different times of backup), and when I tried going from the oldest window all the way to "now," the screen again exhibited a lot of the same screen distortions of before. It went all haywire, but I managed to exit. That incident left a lot of pixel artifacts mostly in the form of green pixels scattered throughout the screen. Later on I installed a Java update that was new and then shut it down. Right before posting this I decided to open up the computer just for the heck of it. I removed some parts, unplugged a cord, then put everything back. It was pretty useless but I wanted to see if anything video related was removable, but it wasn't using anything I had or with the time I wanted to spend. I turned on the computer again, but this time it didn't go all the way. For all I know it could be because I was messing around with its innards. The screen didn't get very far the first time. It was stuck on a black screen with a very cool pattern of very scattered red, green, and blue pixels. On subsequent tries, it got a little farther to the Apple logo, but it always had the screen fuzzies. On the last try it got to a solid blue screen with no artifacts. That's when I gave up. So I'm very sure that it has something to do with the video card. It doesn't appear to be the display, because otherwise it would boot fine. In this case the whole system seems to be suffering because I guess maybe the video card is just failing and it can't process anything properly and then everything else doesn't know what to do. I really have no idea about specifics, that's just my uneducated guess. And what sucks even more is that there was actually an Apple Repair Program to fix first-gen iMac G5s with video or power issues. Except it ended last year, and it doesn't even apply for my serial number! But I'm very sure that it's suffering the same problems as the machines in the program. www.apple.com/support/imac/repairextensionprogram/And after a random Google search, I found this guy: That's almost EXACTLY my issue! And his iMac doesn't have the right serial number either! Now I just want to complain to Apple about not including my computer in the program and ending it when they did.
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Post by Pablo on Dec 6, 2009 21:39:14 GMT
Well, it had a good life. Take it to the Apple Store?
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Post by Sporlo on Jan 15, 2010 23:38:39 GMT
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Post by Pablo on Jan 16, 2010 0:20:54 GMT
Wow, that's sure a messed-up computer. *plays Taps*
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Post by IsraeliRD on Jan 16, 2010 0:26:28 GMT
That computer took a while to die. Thanks for the screenies
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Post by SonicW1 on Jan 16, 2010 3:20:24 GMT
Haha nice job
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Post by Stal on Jan 16, 2010 3:57:27 GMT
hah, funny had a 20 yr old comp once, beat that!
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Post by Perishingflames on Jan 16, 2010 5:01:48 GMT
Lol. Well, if you really want to find out see if you can run a computer diagnostics (if it will even turn on). Just pop in the os dvd and restart holding d on startup. Either way it's def. not worth getting it repaired; you'd need a new logic board either way
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Post by Sporlo on Jan 16, 2010 6:02:29 GMT
We've already got a new one PF and I'm almost positive I've destroyed its innards too much for it to get very far in reading a disk... It was just weird because after all that it seemed like there'd be a more catastrophic failure or it would just come back like before. Here's to hoping Apple hasn't slacked off on part quality recently. I want our new one to last at least as long as the G5.
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