New iMac teething problems :(

Durzel · 20 Mar 2013 at 16:30

Finally received my fully loaded iMac, installed the 32GB of Crucial RAM I bought for it and everything seemed to be going fine.

I've since had a couple of occasions where I've just had a spinning beach ball appear whilst seemingly doing nothing and the system being mostly unresponsive for 1-2 minutes. I just put it down to running Parallels Desktop and it being flaky or something (I've got no proof of this)

This afternoon I had a really weird problem where websites like "the big forest" and "that famous auction house" loaded but looked like the stylesheets weren't being applied properly. I tried clearing cache, etc but it made no difference. Finally I just tried restarting it but it got as far as the grey screen before you see the circular activity timer, but that never came up - I just saw the mouse cursor instead.

Did a quick Google which recommended running Apple Hardware Test. I booted up the iMac whilst holding down D to access it. Began a test and it seemed to freeze after only 29 seconds whilst "Testing memory".

It seems to be pointing towards iffy memory, but I've ran Memtest4.22 on the machine and it's done a pass without any errors.

Could a faulty Fusion drive cause this behaviour instead? Anything else I should try?

edit: I've also got ESET Antivirus installed, but if this was causing problems it wouldn't explain AHT freezing surely?

theheyes · 20 Mar 2013 at 16:39

How many passes did memtest complete? I'd leave it for a good few hours if not overnight. Does sound like a memory issue.

You could also try popping the original memory back in and see if the problems go away.

Durzel · 20 Mar 2013 at 16:40

Only 1 pass so far, will leave it on overnight running it.

theheyes · 20 Mar 2013 at 16:47

I've seen errors pop up on pass 2 or even 3. Could be a faulty motherboard also.

Durzel · 20 Mar 2013 at 16:54

God that would be a nightmare if true, it took well over a month to arrive in the first place

uniQ · 20 Mar 2013 at 17:04

Durzel said:
This afternoon I had a really weird problem where websites like "the big forest" and "that famous auction house" loaded but looked like the stylesheets weren't being applied properly.

You mean Amazon and eBay?

Durzel · 20 Mar 2013 at 17:06

Yes, didn't think we were allowed to mention them.

Durzel · 20 Mar 2013 at 17:39

Is it safe to run Memtest86 overnight when I can't turn the screen off? Worried about screen burn-in as the top left hand side of the screen doesn't change...

edit: Running Apple Hardware Test again, it doesn't actually freeze like I thought - it's just the "Total Time Testing" value doesn't go up second by second, it jumps... it took 7 minutes to test the memory during which there was no sign of it doing anything..

edit 2: Passed a normal test run of AHT after 9 mins 8 seconds, "no trouble found" was the report.