It’s the stinkin’ G4 eMac. I will leave it all night I guess, with the gray background screen with the darker gray apple and the spinning gear thingy. Doubt if it will have started up by morning. I think it’s busterated.
Won’t start in safe mode (with shift held,) or anything else I can think of.
Any thoughts or is it time for the hatchet? I do not want to have to buy another computer for kids/homework.
They don’t show this in the commercials.
BTW, those Mac commercials are brilliant. Brilliant.
You may need to reinstall the system if you get the spinning beach ball.Have you done a clean install?
I thought mac’s never broke and were powered by magic pixie dust? What happened to this one?
PC got fed up with Mac and slipped him a mickey finn
Did this happen all at once, or were there warning signs? Have you tried booting from the CD that came with it? (If that doesn’t work the first time, try it again holding down the C key.)
It could be something as simple as the clock battery having run down or the PRAM needing to be reset (I think that is command-option-p-r while booting; should be in the manual). That may not be applicable if you’re running OSX.
Perhaps I will do better now that it’s morning. It’s pathetic how dysfunctional I can be after 8pm.
That is not to say that I will, for certain, succeed. But I went to bed with visions of $1000 new macs dancing in my head.
Perhaps I will run the “Apple Hardware Test” cd. Yes. Why not?
Ok wow. It ran through several minutes of screen patterns and colors the likes of which I’ve never seen on a mac before. surreal. And then it said there’s nothing wrong. (dang thing still won’t boot.)
Perhaps a hardware restore now. Yes. Why not?
Wait at least until July when the new OS is coming out. That way you won’t be stuck with the old one again 
Seriously, I really hope you can figure it out. I have no advice (no surprise there 
), but I’d be more than happy to ask the resident Guru here at Casa Izz when he gets home from school if you’d like.
I’m envious of the fact that your dysfunctional-ness doesn’t start until after 8pm, by the way. I’ve been discovering that mine is a lot like “morning” sickness, and just lasts all day long
Just a note,
When you use the reinstall CDs, you have a choice between a total wipe of the system and a reinstall of critical stuff that saves all your user accounts and files. That second option sounds nice, but…
Use the latter option to get your files off the computer, then do a clean wipe. If you just reinstall the critical stuff, your computer will never exactly work right. Applications will be missing, settings messed up, all the fonts switched around. And the Finder will crash a lot more.
Caj
July? Is that what they’re saying now? Where’d you get that info? Because it was supposed to be last year, then it was supposed to be Spring (as in NOW!)…
I am on pins and needles because daughter #1 needs a non-valuable laptop to take as she hangs from frog trees in the Panamanian Jungle and I was going to give her THIS one (my G3, 10.2.8, iBook) but that was based on the assumption that I could upgrade…and I’m NOT upgrading…no,not an inch…until Leopard! And now the eMac is crashing.
It is a big fat Apple conspiracy to unload soon-to-be-obsolete OS’s on me! But I won’t do it. I will not upgrade pre-Leopard. So take that Apple! I’ll go to the library every day if I have to…or 3 of us at a time will arm-wrestle to see who gets to use the PC…but we will hang in there!
Ok, wow. Thank you for that note. It seems to be functioning from the selective reinstall, but yes–we’ll do backups so that I can wipe the slate if need be.
Oops…I was wrong, it’s not July. It’s October. On the Apple site, they have this little tidbit at the bottom of their Leopard blurb:
I have no idea why this is, but I think it has something to do with the new iPhone and it’s release. Just my speculations, though.
SCREEEEEEECH!
(sorry.)
Ok. We can do it. We can wait.
The eMac seems to be up and running. (Take that Apple!)
And we’ll find some way for the kid to compute her froggy data without me having to go 'puterless for 6 months. No Apple. I will not take one of your old ocelots or pumas (or whatever you’re on now) off your hands. Nope.