Old but wonderful,,,,,,,,

[jchuzi]

You said that it was working fine this morning and you also implied that it is never shut down. Sometimes, restarting does wonders! In fact, that is one of the first troubleshooting steps that I take and it works more often than not.

[jcarter]

Last week I started to restart it frequently, as it always acts happier when I do. The beach ball goes away.

Ive tried to have less stuff running simultaneously also, that helps too.

Wondering why this problem is intermittent?

[jchuzi]

When the problem resurfaces, launch Activity Monitor and see if there is any process hogging CPU.

[jcarter]

Yes, will try that again. Sometimes its Safari and a few other things, so I quit them.
But its still intermittent.

[Xairbusdriver]

I usually don't put much stock into "reviews" of other software posted by devs who sell similar types of apps. Strange how their own software seems to always be "the best".

As we have stated earlier, just because DU says it cannot repair a drive does not mean the drive cannot be repaired. It is simply saying DU can't do the job. Apple actually has no real incentive to repair a drive after the first year. They would much rather have you pay for that service or, even better, buy a new machine. That's why DW continues to be valuable and useful.

But always remember, a HD will fail, they do wear out. If yours is original to the machine, it is well past its failure date. Some consumer drives can include a 3 year guarantee but I've never heard of a 10 year one!

[jcarter]

OK, so what do you recommend?

The machine is working perfectly tonight.
Confusing isn't it.

I do see that Facebook is slower than anything else, but I use it for placing dogs, and local photography. So I just click out of the page when Ive finished.

[jchuzi]

I have always sworn by Disk Warrior. If you are using 10.13 or previous and your drive is formatted HFS+, it will work. DW has always been my go-to utility. I also have TechToolPro, which has a fine reputation, but I always trust DW for rebuilding the directory (TTP will do that also, but it has many other features that DW lacks). Drive Genius has a good reputation but I have no personal experience with it.

TTP will work with APFS formatted drives.

[Xairbusdriver]

The "ball is in your court", Jane.

I think it was Aristotle who one tweeted: "Advice not taken is advice wasted."

[Paddy]

Normally, I'd say replace the drive with an SSD; would give you a nice speed boost and solve the probably-failing-drive problem. However, that iMac can't be updated past High Sierra. So, unless you want/need to keep it to run old software, you're probably better off moving to a newer iMac that can run the most recent OS and browsers etc. You can run the older software on the other iMac - either on separate partition, a separate bootable drive or using something like Parallels if you want ease of switching back and forth; if you do that, you can update the OS on the "main" partition of the iMac and still use the older OS when required.

What older software are you worried about losing? I've only got a few things left to find alternatives for, on what was originally a long list - have been moving off Adobe entirely, though still humming and hawing about Lightroom and whether or not to just spend the $150 CDN a year to have it and not have to go through the hassle of having to move 100,000+ photos to CaptureOne or ON1.

[jcarter]

Hi Paddy,
Thank you, I think a new Mac would be good, the mouse just quit too.
All my pictures are on the little external HD, and the best up on iCloud, Flicker and my website.
I dont really care about the other stuff, and almost all of it is on the other iMac(6 years old)

Its working perfectly now,,,,,,,confusing.

So Xmas is coming,,,,,thanks again.

[Paddy]

Nothing worse than intermittent issues that can't be replicated by the user. My iMac randomly shuts down every now and then. No warning - screen goes black and the only way out is the power button (the fans sometimes spin up - but it's frozen). In the Console, all I see (usually) is some complaints about quicklookd - which I and many other people have noted seeing with this situation on the Apple forums. Nobody has a solution. It's persisted through numerous OS updates too. Sometimes I'll go weeks or months without it happening - and then it does it every day for several days. Very weird - and no, there is no pattern to what I'm doing and when it does it. For now, I just live with it. And remember to save whatever I'm working on frequently if it's in software that doesn't have an autosave built-in.

[jcarter]

Thats interesing as my other one would shut down like this and restart on its own.
I blamed our generator, but it was not that, it was just random. It has not done it for about 8 months.

Now this one is running like a charm, except for the dead magic mouse. Im using a really old fashioned wired mouse and its a pain, too old to scroll.
A new MM is about $80 I think.

I try to remember to quit FF and Chrome and just leave the one browser on for most of the time, Safari

Here is a list of what was taking juice on Activity Monitor.

[Highmac]

My 2010 27in iMac sometimes just blanked and went off but didn't switch itself back on. Eventually stopped working altogether and it turned out to be the graphics card. When it was about eight years old I learned there had been a recall for some machines with dodgy graphics cards. Removed the nearly new HDD and it was taken as scrap by our local Apple repairer.


Now have a 2018 MacMini and a 27in LG 4K monitor. Lovely... 

[jcarter]

Remember long ago, when I had a 21 inch one which popped its motherboard and power supply 3 times. When I called Applecare, they said if it does it again, call us, and you deserve a new one. 
You people here told me to look up the serial # and if it was within a group, these were known for this trouble. It was.

Apple paid for the first 3 repairs in full, I had it done locally.
So when I was on the phone with them, he said send the old one in, I did, and within a couple days here was a brand new 24 inch one at our front door!
It still works fine. Tho I grabbed the mouse for this one.  I have all my old photoshop stuff and very old photos on it.