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chrisleeroth

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 19, 2005
64
0
My mom has has an iBook for about a year now and ever since 5 months ago it has been acting really wierd a slow. Beofre it was pretty fast, faster than any other computer I have used, but now it is really slow, closes thing unexpectedly, makes "recovered" files in word, and so on. She has taken it in 4 times and has been reformatted 4 times. Now tomorrow I am going to take it in for her, and it is not going to be pretty. I want something done so that it acts just like it did when she first got it, thats it, nothing more. Anyone have some rhetoric that I should use to the geniuses at the genius bar?
 

wdlove

macrumors P6
Oct 20, 2002
16,568
0
Just calmly explain to the Mac Genius what you have told us. I think that it's best to have a friendly attitude. That is very frustrating to have it worked on 4 times with no resolution.
 

slooksterPSV

macrumors 68040
Apr 17, 2004
3,543
305
Nowheresville
Here's how you fix it up - (only 3rd and fourth have to be followed in the correct order lol)
First of all, buy more RAM, RAM is good
Secondly - Repair the hard disk by booting off of the CD
Thridly - When the time comes, buy another faster bigger hard drive
Fourthly - When Thirdly is done, partition it down into at least 2 sections - sizes are how you decide to slice them up
Fifthly - reset PRAM, remove startup items, repair permissions etc.
Lastly - Create new users and transfer all files to a new user account
Onyx is good too.
 

chrisleeroth

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 19, 2005
64
0
slooksterPSV said:
Here's how you fix it up - (only 3rd and fourth have to be followed in the correct order lol)
First of all, buy more RAM, RAM is good
Secondly - Repair the hard disk by booting off of the CD
Thridly - When the time comes, buy another faster bigger hard drive
Fourthly - When Thirdly is done, partition it down into at least 2 sections - sizes are how you decide to slice them up
Fifthly - reset PRAM, remove startup items, repair permissions etc.
Lastly - Create new users and transfer all files to a new user account
Onyx is good too.

Here is how to fix it? That sounds more like a way to customize the computer. I do not think that is the correct way to "fix" the problem b/c it use to run just fine, and now it does not. My mom does not really download anything. She just uses it for Word and for the internet... AOL. Do you think that it could be an AOL problem, b/c AOL and Macs seem not to like to work with each other.
 

Applespider

macrumors G4
It might be slower because you were using Panther which had a minimum memory spec of 128MB with 256MB.

Now you're using Tiger which has a minimum memory spec of 256MB with the minimum memory. Add two or three widgets being 'active' and it's going to feel slower.

In the meantime, buying extra RAM will make a huge difference - and it's come down a lot in price in recent months.

Check the hard drive space that's left. If it's under 5GB, you have some cleaning out to do and that's also what may be making it run slow. Make sure Office is patched and up to date - there was some problem with it 'autosaving' temporary files and never deleting them so that documents became inordinately large and became corrupted/ate up hard drive space.
 
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