This Can’t Be Good…

So I woke up to find my computer frozen, with a bunch of purple and green square all over the screen. The mouse worked fine, but everything else was totally locked up.

It made me feel like my Mac had the measles. Didn’t know what was going on – virus maybe?

The night before I had installed the Brave browser, curious to check it out. But pretty certain that wasn’t what was causing this issue. I was stumped.

And, like any good computer nerd… first thing to try was to turn it off and on again.

Not… promising.

I was able to reboot one time, and the computer began working ok. But about two hours later, the squares came back and froze the machine. A restart led me to the login screen, but then froze at that point.

I tried restarting a few more times, and my iMac began to sound like an airplane taking off. So I let it sit for a while.

Spent most of the afternoon and evening working on the garden box, outside. Came back in to the office around 10PM, and decided to start the computer up again.

And saw this. Right now, can’t seem to get past the loading screen. I still see the pink bars, and now it just shows me a blank white screen after the Apple/loading sequence.

Sometimes there are colored squares, sometimes it’s just white. Either way, it’s usually frozen.

The screen dims though, after 10 minutes. And if I hit the space bar, it brightens back up. So hey – at least the screen saver and wake feature are working.

From what I could research online, others have reported this issue – though no specific cause was ever determined. When things were working I tried repairing permissions/disk, but never sure if that actually does anything.

My friend BJ (@RobotDeathSquad) said he had a similar thing happen to one of his machines, and believes it to be the video card. Which, if that’s the case… I guess it’s time for me to say my goodbyes, and start looking around for a new computer.

On startup, I hear the hard drive working… and a few times I’ve tried to just let it sit and do what it needs to do, hoping it would emerge magically “fixed” and working if I just let it be. So far though, no such luck.

Good thing I brought my work laptop home with me this weekend. Otherwise, I’d be in even more of a bind.

Time to start looking around at all the shiny things at Apple. I’ve liked the huge screen, but starting to think that I’d be fine with a laptop and a nicer monitor.

Good news is I use Time Machine, and I’m 95% certain that I have a recent backup. Still may need to crack open the iMac and take out the hard drive – something I’ve not done before, but I think I know enough to be able to do it.

I spent a lot of Saturday working on my talk and slides for the upcoming 20×2 Chicago talk. Thank god I was working out of, and saving everything to, a Dropbox folder.

Related:
New iMac
iMac Crash