I have an Intel iMac G5 24”. I purchased it nearly 3 years ago. It has always been disappointingly slow, especially when working with Adobe CS but in the past few weeks, almost everything I ask it to do results in the spinning beach ball of death. Now it has started having all kinds of display problems, ghosting, horizontal lines, sections chopped out of screen and sometimes widgets become just a mass of Technicolor lines. I don't even know where to start with this. I would just buy a new one but I am afraid the problem would follow when I transferred over all the content from the old one. I'd appreciate any direction.

Thanks, Richard.

Hi Richard,
By the sound of it you have a hardware issue with your logic board/on-board video.
Have you noticed the machine slowing or an increase in screen artifacting as it becomes warmer or do the problems occur straight from a cold boot?

Software would not usually be the cause of the issues you are seeing so migrating your information to a new machine, I am fairly certain will resolve your issue.
If you have an external hard drive which you are happy to erase then I would recommend installing your OS on that and running some of your applications just to rule out the software element but from your description the symptoms are almost certainly hardware related.

Hope this helps.
Good luck.

Hi - thanks for your help! The problem tends to occur when the machine is getting hot but is particularly exacerbated by the number of programs I am running. As soon as I start running Photoshop, Illustrator etc. its game over.

Thanks again for your reply.

Rick.

Hi Rick, not a problem at all.

This is an overheating problem you are having, which could very well have caused hardware damage to one or more components on your logic.
This may sound silly but you could try moving your machine away anything it is sitting in front of, taking it out of direct sunlight and putting a desk fan behind it do that air is blowing into the rear of the machine. Depending on the model, the air intake will either be through a slot across the back or through a grid on the bottom. Ensure both of these areas are clear and see if this resolves/prolongs the working of your machine.

Other than that I'm afraid some hardware troubleshooting may be your only bet.
At a long shot you could try swapping memory but it's not likely this would be causing your issue.