The following has been ignored by the folks I bought the machine from. Any help is greatly appreciated: "Please advise so I can get my Performa running again. A few years ago I purchased a Performa 6360, monitor & keyboard from you guys. I believe I added more RAM, then installed the Sonnet G3 processor upgrade in the L2 cache slot. The computer has been a pleasure to use. I’ll add that the owner of XXX (can’t recall his name), who took my order and selected the pieces, installed OS 8.6 before shipping, so I don’t have any install or restore disks. My 6360 spent two years in my office at Penn State during grad school, then was packed away from summer 2005 until last November. When I set it up, she would not start up completely. I figured the battery was long dead, and ordered another off Amazon.com (Ray O Vac 840). Installed that in late December (I don’t keep the machine here) and she started up on the 2nd try (perhaps even using the Cmd-Opt-P-R). She has started up and run well since then, on the occasions I’ve had to use her. Last month I set up an internet dial-up service so I could at least check e-mail when I’m at the house the 6360 is at. That went well for a week. The next time I was there, I fired up the computer, went online, and the screen froze after a couple of minutes. She has not booted up completely since then. I even bought another battery, thinking the first replacement was old and died in a few months. 6360 will not start up. All seems normal until the first extension icon appears on the start-up screen; the screen freezes at that point. Cmd-Opt-P-R does not help. Can you offer any advise or technique to force this computer to start up? I’d hate to lose it now, it’s been such a good one and I sure need to be online at my other address. Your help is really appreciated."

Seems like you've got an extension conflict. Hold shift when you start up, it'll disable all extensions so it will start up properly. Then all you have to do is go into extensions manager in control panels and select the base set, then enable any others one at a time (restart after each one). It'll take a while but its the best way; trial and error. Eventually when you enable an extension and you get the same frozen startup screen you'll have identified what extension is causing the problem (hopefully). Depending on what it is, you can probably disable it. If you need that extension for something, then you'll either have to try and find an updated versions of it (if one exists) or find an alternative.

Thanks much, flaptops. I'll try my luck at that next time I'm at the computer.

URL's to a couple of articles. Do you have any comments before I take that info 100 miles and try to troubleshoot that thing myself? Thx... http://docs.info.apple.com/article.... http://docs.info.apple.com/article....

Could be an extension, could be corrupt software, could be bad hardware. Post a list of extensions and control panels, I'll tell you want is needed and what is not. If it froze mid operation, than might have bad hardware, or something else corrupt. Articles from the apple site for old macs are typically useless. Core 2 Duo 1.86 2GB DDR 667 ASUS P5L-MX Nvidia 8500GT 500/1000

In the end I worked with an agent at Sonnet to determine that the old Crescendo board was probably defective. I found a used one on eBay, crossed my fingers and bought it. Downloaded Sonnet's latest extension for that upgrade, and that fixed it! Along with the additional 64MB of RAM I added for a total of 136 (64+64+8)she runs as well as that model machine can! Thanks for your help!