MacBook running like a dog. Any ideas?

[sunfast]

My MacBook - faultless until earlier today is running awfully. Apps bouce for ages and ages (20-30+ times), copying a file to my external HD is going at about 1meg every 5 seconds, spinning beachballs everywhere, apps say "not responding" and everything is really slow. Dashboard takes 20secs to come up for example.

I've logged out, I've restarted and no change. Can anybody help me? I'd be soooo grateful

 

[FleurDuMal]

My MacBook - faultless until earlier today is running awfully. Apps bouce for ages and ages (20-30+ times), copying a file to my external HD is going at about 1meg every 5 seconds, spinning beachballs everywhere, apps say "not responding" and everything is really slow. Dashboard takes 20secs to come up for example.

I've logged out, I've restarted and no change. Can anybody help me? I'd be soooo grateful

Have you had any kernal panics? Have you installed your own third party RAM?

 

[mkrishnan]

Run activity monitor and sort by % CPU... what're the top few items? Or screengrab it and post it.

 

[Bluefusion]

Definitely open Activity Monitor and sort by CPU--see if anything is causing the problem (something loading at login?)

 

[sunfast]

Have you had any kernal panics? Have you installed your own third party RAM?

Never had a kernal panic on any mac (to date!). I do have third party RAM in but that passed a full memtest and has been in there happily for a couple of months.

Run activity monitor and sort by % CPU... what're the top few items? Or screengrab it and post it.

Ironically it has just settled down - I dug out my G4 to post and left the MB alone. It seems happy at the moment - no processes of any note at all. But it really did have a fit, and was massively unresponsive for quite a long time. I hope it was a one off episode anyway.

Is there something I could do maintenance wise to keep it from messing up like that again?

And thank you all very much for such quick replies

 

[skunk]

Never had a kernal panic on any mac (to date!). I do have third party RAM in but that passed a full memtest and has been in there happily for a couple of months.



Ironically it has just settled down - I dug out my G4 to post and left the MB alone. It seems happy at the moment - no processes of any note at all. But it really did have a fit, and was massively unresponsive for quite a long time. I hope it was a one off episode anyway.

Is there something I could do maintenance wise to keep it from messing up like that again?

And thank you all very much for such quick replies

My set-up keeps spiking in Safari, activity rockets to 100% and then down to 2%. Is it connected to Safari, perhaps?

 

[frenetic]

This sounds very much like a hard drive failing. Open disk utility, and check the smart status of your drive. If it says failing, back up crucial data immediately. If I were you I would also run the disk utility from the install disk and run "repair disk".

 

[mkrishnan]

Frenetic's advice is good, but it's also possible it was doing some background stuff involving spotlight indexing or something. How long was it slow for?

 

[NextTuesday]

Might I reccommend (as a second last resort, last being contacting Apple) wiping your Hard-Drive and re-installing OS X again? (after you back-up, of course)

 

[sunfast]

This sounds very much like a hard drive failing. Open disk utility, and check the smart status of your drive. If it says failing, back up crucial data immediately. If I were you I would also run the disk utility from the install disk and run "repair disk".

This is interesting. I wondered about this and consequently verified the disk using disk utility. It reckoned it was all good. The drive isn't very old (1 year) so it shouldn't be wearing out should it?

 

[mkrishnan]

You are way below the "mean time between failures." But there's an underlying normal distribution. Drives do occasionally fail early. Verifying the disk actually has NOTHING to do with this though. Be careful. Verifying means that the disk *logical* structure is valud -- not the physical structure. The check for physical structure is that Disk Utility should say the disk has a SMART status of Verified at the bottom of the window.

 

[sunfast]

You are way below the "mean time between failures." But there's an underlying normal distribution. Drives do occasionally fail early. Verifying the disk actually has NOTHING to do with this though. Be careful. Verifying means that the disk *logical* structure is valud -- not the physical structure. The check for physical structure is that Disk Utility should say the disk has a SMART status of Verified at the bottom of the window.

This is remembering off the top of my head (not at my mac now) but I think it said something like SMART status N/A. Does that make sense?

 

[frenetic]

I think that is a bad sign... If I am not mistaken your start-up hard disk should always be verifiable. Once yo get back to your mac check it out again.

I just had to think of a failed hard drive because that is exactly how my powerbook reacted when its hard drive failed: slow reaction times, taking ages to open apps...

 

[sunfast]

I think that is a bad sign... If I am not mistaken your start-up hard disk should always be verifiable. Once yo get back to your mac check it out again.

I just had to think of a failed hard drive because that is exactly how my powerbook reacted when its hard drive failed: slow reaction times, taking ages to open apps...

That's not my start up disk I wasn refering too - it's my USB2 external. Will check SMART status of my startup when I get home tonight.