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iSteven

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 6, 2008
22
0
tennessee
While surfing the web or just running basic applications, my MBP tends to "temporarily freeze" or load. A.K.A the spinning beach ball of death. No specific apps just anything, safari, mozilla, itunes, Microsoft word, anything. What could be some reasonable logical explanations for this? I use to have a PC with vista and do things like clear cookies or defrag my hard drive. I just would like to know some basic maintenance that i could perform with MAC OS 10 if there even is any??

Thanks
 

ayzee

macrumors 6502a
Jun 12, 2008
576
35
Same is happening with me. I think mac os is always optimizing itself so no need for defragging. Maybe check how much Hard drive space you have left and try to free some more up. The mac os always starts misbehaving when there isn't much disk space left
 

SteinMaster

macrumors 6502
Feb 28, 2009
260
0
USA
While surfing the web or just running basic applications, my MBP tends to "temporarily freeze" or load. A.K.A the spinning beach ball of death. No specific apps just anything, safari, mozilla, itunes, Microsoft word, anything. What could be some reasonable logical explanations for this? I use to have a PC with vista and do things like clear cookies or defrag my hard drive. I just would like to know some basic maintenance that i could perform with MAC OS 10 if there even is any??

Thanks

I was just going to post a question similar to yours and saw what you posted. I am also experiencing the beach ball, but I am also experiencing something more irritating to me. I have a late 2008 MacBook Pro 2.53ghz, 320 gb HDD. When I start from a shutdown, it takes twice as long to boot than when I first bought it. I realize I have downloaded more application and files, but I don't think these would affect how quick/slow the MacBook boots. Is there anything I can do to check and optimize what is causing the slow boot? I have not used half of my HDD and I have used disk utility to repair permissions and verify disk. I also use CleanMyMac often to delete unwanted files.

My wife has a MacBook Pro aluminum (with the grey keys), pre-unibody and it starts in half the time mine does. She has the same ram and a slower processor.
 

DewGuy1999

macrumors 68040
Jan 25, 2009
3,194
6
While surfing the web or just running basic applications, my MBP tends to "temporarily freeze" or load. A.K.A the spinning beach ball of death. No specific apps just anything, safari, mozilla, itunes, Microsoft word, anything. What could be some reasonable logical explanations for this? I use to have a PC with vista and do things like clear cookies or defrag my hard drive. I just would like to know some basic maintenance that i could perform with MAC OS 10 if there even is any??

Thanks

OS X doesn't have a lot in common with Windows and consequently there isn't a lot of routine maintenance to do or that can be done. OS X uses disk space differently than Windows and doesn't need defragging. I've never understood how deleting cookies would make a computer faster, but if you want to do that most browsers make that available in the options/preferences.

However, with a bit more information there might be one or two things that you can do. Which Mac are you using? Which version of OS X are you using? How much RAM do you have?
 

DewGuy1999

macrumors 68040
Jan 25, 2009
3,194
6
I was just going to post a question similar to yours and saw what you posted. I am also experiencing the beach ball, but I am also experiencing something more irritating to me. I have a late 2008 MacBook Pro 2.53ghz, 320 gb HDD. When I start from a shutdown, it takes twice as long to boot than when I first bought it. I realize I have downloaded more application and files, but I don't think these would affect how quick/slow the MacBook boots. Is there anything I can do to check and optimize what is causing the slow boot? I have not used half of my HDD and I have used disk utility to repair permissions and verify disk. I also use CleanMyMac often to delete unwanted files.

My wife has a MacBook Pro aluminum (with the grey keys), pre-unibody and it starts in half the time mine does. She has the same ram and a slower processor.

Go to the System Preferences...
Go to Startup Disk
Make sure your internal Hard Drive is selected
Close System Preferences...

See if that makes it boot any faster.
 

HyperX13

macrumors 6502
Sep 3, 2009
351
7
Go to disk utility and run the fix permission button on your main hard drive. That fixes a lot of issues. Also, consider upgrading hard drive to solid state drive. I did that and my mac is supper snappy.
 

SteinMaster

macrumors 6502
Feb 28, 2009
260
0
USA
Go to the System Preferences...
Go to Startup Disk
Make sure your internal Hard Drive is selected
Close System Preferences...

See if that makes it boot any faster.

Checked it and it is OK...not sure though how this would fix slow booting.
 

DewGuy1999

macrumors 68040
Jan 25, 2009
3,194
6
Checked it and it is OK...not sure though how this would fix slow booting.

Apparently it can be not selected and that causes the Mac to look for the hard drive to boot from, makes startup slow. Since it's not that, does it have a lot of items loading for Login Items? Does it have any servers that it's trying to connect to at startup?
 

rpaloalto

macrumors 6502a
Sep 19, 2005
733
2
Palo Alto CA.
Do you have any startup items installed?
Many apps have small helper programs that will launch at startup.
Adobe and google are 2 examples.
 

iSteven

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 6, 2008
22
0
tennessee
OS X doesn't have a lot in common with Windows and consequently there isn't a lot of routine maintenance to do or that can be done. OS X uses disk space differently than Windows and doesn't need defragging. I've never understood how deleting cookies would make a computer faster, but if you want to do that most browsers make that available in the options/preferences.

However, with a bit more information there might be one or two things that you can do. Which Mac are you using? Which version of OS X are you using? How much RAM do you have?

The fairly new 15" MBP, the one that came out early this year with the 8 hour battery. OS 10.5.8 with 4 GB memory
 

iSteven

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 6, 2008
22
0
tennessee
Go to disk utility and run the fix permission button on your main hard drive. That fixes a lot of issues. Also, consider upgrading hard drive to solid state drive. I did that and my mac is supper snappy.

Wheres disk utility located?
 

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,419
43,307
I've not run any scripts, onyx or repaired permissions in years and my Mac has always been running smooth. My point is that such tasks are unnecessary. Back when OSX was first released, people had to repair permissions Religiously now not so much. Only when something funky is going on.

The same with onyx, there is no need to run that, as OSX will perform the typical unix maintenance scripts when it restarts/wakes up.
 

DewGuy1999

macrumors 68040
Jan 25, 2009
3,194
6
The fairly new 15" MBP, the one that came out early this year with the 8 hour battery. OS 10.5.8 with 4 GB memory

Okay, that helps. A new MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM should be resonably fast, so it's probably not processor or RAM related.

You could try running Activity Monitor to see if anything in particular is bogging down the processor. Activity Monitor can be found in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder. Click the pop-up at top, so, All Processes shows, then click the column titled %CPU so it sorts by the percent of CPU usage. Keep an eye on it an see what's bogging things down.

You can also use Activity Monitor to see how much of your RAM is being used and by what programs, etc.
 

DewGuy1999

macrumors 68040
Jan 25, 2009
3,194
6
There is a pretty good article in this week's edition of Small Dog.com's Kibbles & Bytes #652. Scroll down to the article Ten Tips for Dealing with Unexpected Mac Slowdowns. Hope this helps.
 
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