G4 Tower spontaneously rebooting

deluindeluin
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
My co-worker has a G4 450 tower, pretty standard fair. I'm not technically the tech guy here at work I just happen to do a lot of it and our IT guy is out of town so it's my job in the interim. And I'm stuck.



We run OS 10.2 and primarily use Filemaker 6, Office, various graphics and MIDI programs and that's it. Nothing to stressful, as the majority of our files are kept on a fileserver.



The odd thing is, for no apparent reason, his computer reboots sporatically. Sometimes he'll be working for hours, and it'll do it, sometimes he'll have to try 10+ times to get it to start. It's not consistent at all - sometimes he'll be in Word, Filemaker, Safari and iChat and it'll reboot, sometimes he'll be using Entourage and nothing else. Sometimes it just reboots when only the finder is running.



What have I looked over trying to diagnose his problem? I can't think of anything!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    skipjackskipjack Posts: 263member
    You've probably done this, but in Applications/Utilities try opening a console window and see if there is anything unusual at the times it reboots. (I just opened a console window and it has a history back to October 15th.)
  • Reply 2 of 5
    mynameismynameis Posts: 74member
    Faulty PSU?
  • Reply 3 of 5
    boukmanboukman Posts: 93member
    In my experience, this is most of the time due to either an overheating CPU (usually an overclocked one) or bad RAM. In this case, I doubt it is a CPU issue, so I would try to look into the RAM, maybe removing one stick at a time to see if it solves the problem. Sometimes, a RAM stick can go bad...
  • Reply 4 of 5
    bungebunge Posts: 7,329member
    Check your power strip.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Another possibility:

    Check that all of the power plugs are firmly inserted into the harddrives. A loose connector can cause the machine to reboot.
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