iMac G5 Meltdown
Friends of mine have pinged me with news that iMac G5 machines are having a meltdown. Apparently, the machines have been a hit with corporate users who are snapping up these puppies. However, most corporate employees tend to leave their computers powered up overnight. This is resulting in overheating and resulting in power supply brownouts and fan problems. Anyone else hear this news? I wonder, the popularity of everything Apple is resulting in technical problems all the time. I had the same problems with iPods in the past.
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I could believe this if they have turned off “Sleep”, which is likely because they probably have a really cool screen saver.
I have sleep turned off on my PowerMac G5 because I love the photo screensaver. Occasionally, I will be sitting watching TV and the sound of jet aircraft will come from the other end of the room, meaning the fans have turned on.
One suggestion I made to someone was to use the ‘Schedule’ control to turn off your computer at, say, 9:00PM and back on about a half-hour before you generally arrive at work.
My iMac G5 was a victim just last week. Power supply flamed out, and left scorch marks on the motherboard (midplane). Apple was great to work with, and the machine is so well designed that user service is easy. However, it took a few days to get the parts because of stock issues. That suggests that it is not an isolated occurance. The replacement power supply is now a 120/240 universal unit, and I hope that the problem does not return.
Just an FYI on screensavers and LCD’s. Don’t use them! First of all LCD’s don’t burn in so there is no point. Second, the light source inside the lcd has a limited lifetime and if you are doing anything that uses the display (including a screen saver or visualizer in iTunes) the light is on. Thus screen savers (in theory) could cause your light source to fail early. The only thing that is going to save your lcd screen is for it to be shut off by the Energy Saver in system prefs. In reference to the article, those computers should be shut off at night anyway.
They don’t need to be shut off, just put to sleep. This means that the cron tasks can run at night, and the computer just needs a wake up in the morning. Another thing, if you do remote administration on PCs or Macs it’s a drag when users shut their PC down because you can’t remotly administer them.
Why shut down at all? Generally, OSX doesn’t need rebooting.
I’ve got one of the first 20″ iMac G5s to ship, and it’s been running at 80% CPU since it shipped without any downtime. While it’s been a bit louder than I expected (absolute quiet), it hasn’t had any reliability problems.
Our iMac is unusually loud; Apple claims the hardware checks out. But compared to equipment from other vendors, it’s noticeably louder and more annoying, especially when the CPU is active. Here’s a thread discussing this subject.
G5 running since Jan 1 2005, sleep at night. NO PROBLEMS!
We run a demo 20 inch iMac which is on 24/7, and the only time I’ve heard it sound like a goddamn blow dryer is when I booted it into Single User Mode.
Hit or miss I suppose.
In reply to the notebook being left on all the time. This is at best a G4 and a completely different animal. The cool design for a G5 iMac is a design in progress if they are replacing the power supply with a a different aniimal. The reason we haven’t yet seen a G5 powerbook is for this very reason…overheating problems. The G5 Tower has special cooling devices to keep the processor from overheating.
It’s typical former windoze users don’t understand their machines and what they should do. Their are tools and not something to be understood except through programs, etc.
“That suggests that it is not an isolated occurance.”
It suggests nothing of the sort.
The iMac G5 has been out for 6+ months, and only now someone burned its voltage supply accidentally? Sounds like someone forgot to dust.
Take into account some people are completely disassembling the iMac BEFORE this happens or are adding upgraded (and hotter components) They could have bumped something/loosened something as well.
Most likely this is isolated due to dust/environment or maybe just within the 98.4% quality control.
Parts stock is NO indicator of wide scale problems – it may also be a sign that Apple is selling so many – it can’t even keep up with service parts. This is how the Mac Mini currently is and how the original release of ALL major revisions of the iMac have been (initial 1997 release, 1999 slot load release, 2002 LCD release, 2004 LCD release)