Bought an eMac off ebay
800mhz, 256mb ram, DVD Burner
Since I've got it its had an odd habit of stalling a program, doesnt matter which. Will elaborate in a moment.
Tried memtestosx, didnt find any errors. I ended up buying a stick from tigerdirect to be sure, its not a ram issue.
Seller has been nice. He thought it might be the harddrive, for whatever reason. Got that yesterday, found that eMacs are a major step back from the G3 iMacs in terms of getting to everything. iMac - 3 screws, sliding tray comes right out. eMac - near 30 screws of varying shapes and sizes, tray comes grudgingly out. Replaced harddrive.
I bought an official copy of OS X 10.3 for my iMac, so I've been using that to test the eMac. Clean installs make no difference.

so yeah. I ended up taking a short movie with my aging camera to try and show the guy what its doing. Not the greatest, and apparently I like to drag windows around, but oh well. I think it shows the problem.
here's the bulk of the last email I sent

" http://s4.photobucket.com/albums/y150/windhound/?action=view¤t=P1010283.flv
This is with a clean install of 10.3, off official disks. I installed a few programs - google earth, camino, firefox. I wouldn't expect any of those to have this effect. After some time of use (I think it was on for about an hour in this case) a program, in this case the user manager, will hang. This somehow causes Finder to hang as well, as
well as Console. Force Quit sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.

Ram and harddrive were the two easy parts. After that whats left?"

Waiting on a reply. I've got a few days left to decide what do to. Last I checked PayPal says "sorry, wont help you" after a month has gone by.
Guy's a powerseller, got a 99.8% or so feedback. Was nice in the emails and was quick sending off a replacement harddrive
But there's somthing wrong with it. A clean install of an OS shouldnt hang after an hour or two of use.
Unless I'm missing somthing.

I propped the butt up, the fan runs fine, its not all that dusty inside, so I doubt its overheating.
My next guess is there's somthing misbehaving on the motherboard. It just seems so odd that a program will stop responding, but other programs may or may not continue to work. Finder almost always goes, and its impossible to get back. Force Quit is useless on it. I had a terminal, so I guess I could have kill -9'd it if I had the PID. Still. It shouldnt be doing this, and it does it every time...

I bought it for $96+45 odd shipping. Shipping is half the cost of the thing, but if I have to I'll ask the guy to take it back

Any ideas?

11/29/2007 1:50:59 AM

That is an odd thing...

Only having 256MB of RAM could cause that, esp. in os 10.3. I'd try putting 10.4 in there to see if that helps.

Did the reinstall of OS X go normally, or did it seem to stall or take a long time?

Do any errors pop up in the System log in Console.app?

11/29/2007 3:07:03 AM

yeah, i'd try a bit more ram - os x tends to get a little pushy with its swap space.

if that doesn't work, my next guess would be your logic board.

run hardware diagnostics off of the os x install cd. put it in, reboot, hold down option, choose Apple Hardware Test. to make the test loop, hit command+L (or control+L, i dont remember which) before you start it, it'll say something like "looping on"

run it overnight and post results.

11/29/2007 7:31:20 AM

hmmm, your computer is slow and stalls?

WAIT, i think i found your problem

Quote :

"800mhz, 256mb ram"

11/29/2007 7:43:33 AM

nah, os x will run fairly decently on an 800mhz g4 chip

it's the ram that's killing him

11/29/2007 7:46:17 AM

I could throw the original stick of ram back in, that'd give me 512mb. I left it out to be absolutly sure the issue wasnt bad ram.

I've got OS X 10.3 running solid as a rock on a grape G3 iMac, 333mhz 320mb ram. Processor speed isnt a deterrant, and I wouldnt think an extra stick of 64 would make a difference, but I guess it could. 256 is bare min. for 10.3
Apparently the emac is very close to being able to run Leopard as well, they want 866mhz or so and 512mb ram (?)

the eMac is for my little brother, I need to be sure its not going to cause problems for him

edit: I found the hardware diagnosis, but it said it didnt want to run on my machine for some reason. May need to 'find' another disk... I've got a real copy, so it makes me feel slightly better about finding another...

[Edited on November 29, 2007 at 10:13 AM. Reason : ^]

11/29/2007 10:03:50 AM

Try adding more RAM, but it looks like something is tying up a resource on your computer. The fact that you could still use the web while that was happening would imply it's not something tying up the network resources. The system otherwise looked responsive, which would seem to rule out an HDD problem. Out of curiosity, what was the item in your login items there? Also, in your utilities folder, there's a program called "Activity Viewer" run that and keep an eye on the stats when something like that happens, and see if you can't identify a program that looks like it's hogging resources.

11/29/2007 11:14:38 AM

http://www.memtestosx.org/

get this, it costs like $1.39, almost nothing
make sure it's not the ram... although what you describe leads me to believe it's not.

with ram, it's usually either all or nothing - you wouldn't have just certain applications freeze and others work.

i'm thinking logic board.

take it to the genius bar, they'll at least diagnose it for you even though it's out of warranty

11/29/2007 12:02:59 PM

Quote :

"Tried memtestosx, didnt find any errors. I ended up buying a stick from tigerdirect to be sure, its not a ram issue."

11/29/2007 12:04:27 PM

oh, hah, i can't read apparently nevermind

11/29/2007 12:06:01 PM

yeah... I'm starting to be afraid it is the logic board
It died very shortly after a reboot this time, Disk Utility hung, then Finder became unresponsive.
http://s4.photobucket.com/albums/y150/windhound/?action=view¤t=P1010288.jpg
Activity monitor worked this time, and its fairly clear the machine isnt running out of resources. The pie chart in the dock is ram usage, a good quarter free. CPU just at idle.
Its like the machine doesnt know its dying. No entries in console, no errors or anything. It just seems like its waiting on somthing thats not coming... and thats not going to come. I left it spinning for three hours last night, screensaver started, eventually the monitor turned off. I woke it up later, still spinning. Still selectivly unresponsive.

Did a quick search for apple hardware test disks, apparently they're fairly hardware specific. And Apple only offers downloads to service people, not the public. Which I think is silly, as they only work with specific boxes anyways.
And according to Apple's site they -may- charge an unspecified diagnostic fee. I'll give them a call tomarrow

Thanks for the input

11/29/2007 12:53:40 PM

Why don't you sell it on eBay like the last guy did.

11/29/2007 1:56:37 PM

Quote :

"Did a quick search for apple hardware test disks, apparently they're fairly hardware specific. And Apple only offers downloads to service people, not the public. Which I think is silly, as they only work with specific boxes anyways."

might be able to get you one, i've got an ADC membership

11/29/2007 4:38:34 PM