Someone please tell me what happened and that it will be ok.....

I had a VERY strange occurence last night. I have an iMac G5 PowerPC, OS 10.4.11.

Last night I was working on some stuff - had Quicken, Safari, iTunes and Yahoo IM open. I was on a website in Safari. I logged out of my account on the website and did a cmd-Q to quit. Safari froze. No spinning beachball, no mouse movement, nothing. I tried the forcequit keystroke a few times. No response (that has never happened to me on this computer before). Then I tried to just turn it off.

Ok, then the really freaky part happened. All of a sudden the computer kicked into this...well, the fan went into HIGH gear (literally spewing a bunch of dust out from somewhere, like volcanic ash. I just dusted off and cleaned the computer a couple days ago, so it wasn't dirty at all.) and it was doing this high-pitched sort of whine. It sounded like it was going to blow up - no kidding. I stood there in shock for a moment or two, tried frantically to turn it off another time or two and then hurriedly reached down and unplugged it. It was FREAKY.

I waited a couple minutes and then turned it back on. Everything seems to be ok and working, but I'm wondering what the heck happened and if there's something I should do??? Any clues??

I would run "Repair Permissions" from the Disk Utility application to make sure.

In the future, if you have a system crash, hold down the power key for 5 seconds and the computer will shut down. Much better than unplugging it.

Oh, I know I should have held down the power button - I was just in such a panic, I wasn't thinking. After the fact, I asked myself if I had held the button down or just pushed it, and I'm pretty sure I was just pushing it. That probably would have done it.

It was just such a shock to see this poof of dust come flying out and hear the machine go into hyper-drive, loud, "I'm gonna blow"-mode! Freaked me out! My biggest concern was just that something internally could have gotten smoked, but everything seems to be running ok today. :shrug:

Phew. I just hope it doesn't happen again! :scared:

My former iBook had a few temper tantrums before the hard drive died.

I did think of that too. Unfortunately, the nearest Apple store is 50 miles away. I wouldn't be able to get it there for at least a couple weeks. However, it might be worth a call to them, just to see what their recommendations or thoughts are. If they think I should bring it in, I would, but it wouldn't be right away, I'm afraid. Thank goodness it's working ok for now.

Geez, I hope my poor baby's ok, lol. Seriously, I LOVE my iMac and living without it for even a short time would be awful (not to mention I don't even want to think about repair costs! Ugh.)

Thanks again!

are any problems. Repair permissions while you are there.

Some people have reported some problems with 10.4.11