My Computer is Cracklin!

funkyshepherdfunkyshepherd
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Ok, so I'm just surfing the web, I have iChat open and am listening to music and all of a sudden I hear this crackling noise coming from my computer. Not the speakers, the computer. It sounds like the hard drive working just about twenty times louder.



Now if it was just making noises, that would just be annoying, but when it starts making these noises, the OS goes to hell. I will be in the middle of using Expose and the windows will freeze in the windowed mode. Or my conversations in iChat will stop responding. I still have control of the mosue through all of this, but eventually, everything locks up.



Restarting takes an unusal amount of time after this lock up as well. Any ideas? This is bugging the crap outta me (and kind of scaring me as well. I don't want this thing to lock up and then not be able to restart at all.)



System specs:

Powermac MDD Dual G4

768 MB DDR SDRAM (256 factory, 512 Crucial)

Radeon 9000

80 GB hard drive



Any help would be much appreciated.



p.s. I'm going to run the hardware test now to see if that comes up with anything.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    aslan^aslan^ Posts: 599member
    Sounds like your Hard Disk Drive is near death, you should probably back up all the data you would want to keep if your HDD fails.



    If it sounds like a scratchy sort of crackling and you can pinpoint it coming from the HDD... back up your data !
  • Reply 2 of 3
    dobbydobby Posts: 797member
    I've also have a couple of PC's do this and the crackling sound was interference from a telephone cable.

    The OS was never affected.



    Dobby.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    beigeuserbeigeuser Posts: 371member
    Boy, I hope it's your hard drive.



    I also own a MDD PMG4. During the past year, I heard crackling sounds from it twice. The second time was my 4-year old hard drive failing. So, no problem. But the first incident was the real problem.



    It happened three days after I bought my computer. I heard a series of electrical popping sounds. Apparently, the CPU daughterboard was short circuiting something but it happened underneath the CPU unit so it was not visible. The computer continued to work but erratically. When I took it to the nearby Apple store, they replaced everything in the computer minus the harddrive/DVD drive/Powersupply.
Sign In or Register to comment.