G5 freezes - Office 2004 / Adobe CS conflict?

[Ben Cook]

Hi. I've been having big problems. I just bought a G5 dual 2gig
processor with 2gig ram, more than enough to run Office 2004, Adobe CS
and others, but since day one my machine has been intermittantly
freezing then after a few minutes the screen goes black, causing me to
force restart. I thought initially it was a hardware fault so my
computer's been back to the supplier twice now for repair but both
times they couldn't find a problem. The issue seems to be most
prolific when I run Adobe Creative Suite and Office 2004. I have
erased the hard drive 3 times now and re-installed, the last time I
did this I've been running a basic system (10.3) with just the native
software and Adobe CS installed - with no 3rd party peripherals - to
try to isolate the problem. It ran fine for 3 days. When I then
installed Microsoft Office 2004 I got my first freeze again. Whether
this is just coincidence I can't say for sure as it's very much a
random thing. However, it's been freezing on and off now for a few
days - although nothing seems to trigger it, it's wholly sporadic. Not
good. So far I have lost almost a month trying to get to the bottom of
the problem and it is having disastrous implications on my business.
Logically, you would asume it's a conflict with Microsoft but I
haven't heard anything about it. Any help would be very much
apprciated.

Many thanks,

Ben

 

[Mark Thompson]

You run 10.3?

I believe 2004 requires 10.3.3.

Try updating your software.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

You run 10.3?

I believe 2004 requires 10.3.3.

Try updating your software.

Office 2004 requires OS X 10.2.8. See

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/howtobuy.aspx?pid=sysreq

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

Moderately helpful side note.....other complaints about these two programs
have to do with Entourage 2004 disabling the keyboard shortcuts in Adobe CS.
Which I mention only because it suggests there are numerous people (at least
6) out there running these two programs w/o having the major problems you
are seeing, on both G4s and G5s.

DM

 

[Neill Massello]

Hi. I've been having big problems. I just bought a G5 dual 2gig
processor with 2gig ram, more than enough to run Office 2004, Adobe CS
and others, but since day one my machine has been intermittantly
freezing then after a few minutes the screen goes black, causing me to
force restart. I thought initially it was a hardware fault so my
computer's been back to the supplier twice now for repair but both
times they couldn't find a problem. The issue seems to be most
prolific when I run Adobe Creative Suite and Office 2004. I have
erased the hard drive 3 times now and re-installed, the last time I
did this I've been running a basic system (10.3) with just the native
software and Adobe CS installed - with no 3rd party peripherals - to
try to isolate the problem. It ran fine for 3 days. When I then
installed Microsoft Office 2004 I got my first freeze again. Whether
this is just coincidence I can't say for sure as it's very much a
random thing. However, it's been freezing on and off now for a few
days - although nothing seems to trigger it, it's wholly sporadic. Not
good. So far I have lost almost a month trying to get to the bottom of
the problem and it is having disastrous implications on my business.
Logically, you would asume it's a conflict with Microsoft but I
haven't heard anything about it. Any help would be very much
apprciated.

Who's the "supplier"? Did they install the additional RAM? Your problem
is most likely hardware -- probably bad RAM -- whatever the supplier
says. I suggest you ask Apple.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Ben,

I have an almost identical setup and have experienced the same problem.
But since I don't run Adobe CS very often (I do have it), I don't think
that's the problem.

So far whenever I experienced this I ran Alsfot's Disk Warrior and it
found and fixed problems. Afterwards the computer runs fine for weeks.
Every time it went dark on me Disk Warrior found and fixed directory
problems. I think this one is MacOSX not being able to handle some file
problems. I'm not 100% sure about this, but that's what I'm going with
till someone comes up with a better explanation.

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP