My old iMac G3 kept crashing until I flipped the power strip switch

I was trying to get my Bondi Blue iMac G3 to boot up last weekend and it would just kernel panic every time after 5 minutes. I tried reseating RAM, cleaning the logic board with isopropyl, even swapped the hard drive. Turned out the surge protector strip I had it plugged into was so old the capacitor inside was shot, causing dirty power. Plugged it straight into the wall outlet at my buddy's house in Austin and it's been running fine for 2 days now. Anyone else run into a power strip causing weird issues with old hardware?

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1 Comment

reese1771mo ago

That old surge protector is probably from the dial-up era. Capacitors dry out after 15-20 years and start sending dirty voltage. My buddy's G4 Cube was having random lockups until he swapped his power strip for a new one with actual filtering. The built-in surge protection in old Macs isn't great at handling that kind of ripple either. Always worth checking the simplest stuff first before tearing apart the whole machine.