Trio of iMac problems! Diagnosis?

“This iMac is driving me nuts at work. Here are some of its problems:

1. Gets disconnected from the Internet all the time

2. At times when it disconnects, I get some little info box saying something like, Apple blah blah is not responding properly

3. Sometimes when I go to get into my Outlook Express e-mail account, I get the info screen telling me how the account is not configured properly... or to check my password (which is set up as an automatic log-in)

It also just plain locks up probably once a day.

I find the these problems very hard to diagnose because as I see it, I could be in any of these three areas. So what do you do first, to try to see where exactly the problem is??

1. Phone company line quality sucks. This has happened before. Would make sense on disconnection for all of the net. BUT if I can get into Yahoo and NOT into Outlook Express, what's the problem?

2. ISP sucks. I am not impressed with our ISP. It seems to have problems lots more often, say, than my earthlink connection at home.

3. iMac sucks. Is the modem going bad? Is there really some bad "configuration???"

Heeeeelp!!??!

P.S. It disconnected while I was typing this (-- and it's not like it takes me so long to type that it times out... lol). Cripes!”

“Lizs--
I'll have to ask my hubby-- but it sounds like something to do with the "Appletalk" connection might not be configured right...”

“Hard to keep a dialup connection if the phone line and/or ISP is unreliable. These should be rock solid or you will forever have problems. There should be a control panel somewhere that lets you know when the connection goes down.

If Yahoo! comes up in your browser but Outlook fails to connect, I'd suspect a configuration problem. Since you say Outlook sometimes works, it probably isn't Outlook. Try checking your internet/modem/TCPIP settings. Look for something labeled "maximum simultaneous connections" and try increasing it. (Sorry, I haven't used a modem in a while; not sure where everything is anymore.)

The only modems I've seen go bad are ones that get fried from lightning strikes ... then they don't work at all (and the computer doesn't work, either). Probably not the modem.

The iMac may not have enough memory (RAM), or it may not be allocated properly, especially if you try to run multiple applications simultaneously. This can also lead to freezes.

You may need to update the MacOS. Contact Apple and find out what will work with your iMac.”

“Hey, thanks! hmm... now to implement all that. eeek! :-)”

“See... I told you he'd be a great help! :-) Good luck and let us k”

“I've seen bad modems that would connect sometimes, and disconnect a lot.
If your mail server is down you'll get messages such as that. Our mail server at work is down frequently. Usually it just asks for a password, and reports connection failure.
Sometimes when the connection is dropped you can get an error about bad configuration. That doesn't necessarily mean the configuration is bad. Sometimes the program doesn't know what's happenining and reports the first error it can think of.”