my parents have a mini mac that is having some issues. i don't have much experience w/ macs so i hope someone can help or point me in the direction of help.
the problems are:
-the mouse gets really jerky, either doesn't move at all or moves way too fast, and if the little swirly rainbow thing is going (like the hourglass on a pc) there are 2 small stretched out ones instead of one...then it freezes and we have to hold the power button down to get it to shut off.
-the screen goes blue everyonce in a while out of nowhere. while i was typing this it did it. it's only blue for a second maybe, but still it's weird.
-it was accidentally left on for a month unused (good job dad). i know a pc would freak out about this but i thought macs were above it. lol

it doesn't happen with one particular program it seems. there's hardly anything on this computer, not even word processing software. they only use it to browse the internet. no downloads.

i can fix a pc, but i don't know what i'm doing with a mac. help peas!

2/24/2007 6:48:49 PM

Sounds like a hardware problem, possibly a bad GPU. Leaving it on for a month shouldn't make a difference unless you wrap it in a blanket.

If it's still under warranty, get it looked at, otherwise, either start looking for a new computer, or look to see how much to fix that one.

2/24/2007 10:49:46 PM

take it to a local Apple Store (we've got 2 in the Triangle, 1 at Southpoint and 1 at Crabtree) and have someone from the Genius Bar look at it and diagnose it professionally 

2/25/2007 2:10:45 AM

it's about a year old. it's in emerald isle (nowhere near an apple store basically), but maybe we could drive it up to raleigh one day. it's not under warranty.

2/26/2007 8:44:25 AM

mac mini.

2/26/2007 11:03:43 AM

Quote :

"mac mini."

it's a good thing you correcting her, because we had no fucking idea what she was talking about.

2/26/2007 11:18:00 AM

^^^
if you can borrow it for awhile, either an Apple Store or the Mac support folks at the NCSU Bookstore can offer help even if it's not under warranty -- they won't fix it, but they'll tell you what's wrong

I can take a look at it myself, but if it's hardware-related there's not much I can do

One thing you might want to do is download OnyX and run some of the cleanup scripts. If the computer is shy on RAM, the OS could be fritzing out (MacOS X likes lots of RAM). More info on OnyX:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/onyx.html

2/26/2007 2:40:42 PM

thank you. i'll see if they'll bring it back to RM this weekend. it has just the bare bones, and i was thinking RAM might be the problem.

2/26/2007 2:47:26 PM

^^^no problem man. just wanted to make sure you were on the same page as everyone else.

2/26/2007 2:51:47 PM

I'll agree that OnyX has really made a difference on my Powerbook. I've never had a jittery mouse, but I've had problems with it stalling for up to 30 seconds when I bring it back from sleep mode. Safari also loves to give me the spinning beach ball for 20 to 40 seconds at a time if I haven't ran OnyX lately.

2/26/2007 2:52:36 PM

Quote :

"-it was accidentally left on for a month unused (good job dad). i know a pc would freak out about this but i thought macs were above it. lol"

That certainly shouldn't be a problem, but you never know...

2/26/2007 8:06:26 PM