Intermittent Freezes - Need Suggestions

[Paul Daunno]

I have a late 2009 iMac w/2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 6GB SDRAM, OS X 10.9. On a fairly frequent basis it will go to a white screen, a black screen or something like blue and white stripes and there's absolutely nothing I can do other than do a hard shutdown by pressing the power button. I only recently upgraded the SDRAM and went to Mavericks when it was made available however this problem has existed for quite some time. I've run every diagnostic I know to run and it has found absolutely nothing wrong. The usual software running is Mail, Safari, Pages and of course Accordance (10.3.2). I would appreciate any suggestions for isolating the cause of this issue. As you can imagine when it happens it's quite frustrating...

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Hey Paul,

 

No great answers I'm afraid. This sounds like one for the guys at Apple. You might try ifixit and see if they have any posts on anything similar. My first thought is that it sounds like a hardware but it could be almost anything. I use non-Apple aftermarket memory in my Mac - about the same vintage as yours. I don't know if you have any non-Apple parts. Could be bios. The box isn't getting excessively hot or anything is it ? If you're into it simply pulling it apart and giving it a good look over and a vacuum out might be enlightening.

 

If you can recall anything about what happened about the time the symptoms first appeared that might help.

 

Thx

D