I recently bought a new Mac Book Pro. Almost within weeks it encountered difficulty. Every time I reboot, withing about a day I am in beach ball hell and over days it constantly progresses until I get to a point where I just want to toss the computer out the window... then I reboot again and cycle start over. I am pretty much convinced that it is not a hardware problem. At least the disk utility tells me that my computer is fine. Mind you, can I trust the utility? Anyway, the bottom line is that is seems to be a software problem. My question is, are there proceedures or software out there that does a diagnosis on the computer to tell which is the offending software?
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Beach Ball Hell
- Thread starter SBoudreau
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Open Activity Monitor and go to the System Memory* tab and look for Page Outs and Swap used after a day or two of typical usage and report back.
Two things come to mind:
You can check spotlight using Activity Monitor. Setup Activity Monitor to list all active applications, not just yours, then sort them by name. If you see the process named mds and it's worker threads which will be named mdworker and the CPU percentage is high then it's spotlight. This was a problem on older (Tiger, Leopard) systems but they've gotten it pretty well cleaned up on Snow Leopard and Lion, unless there's some type of problem with the spotlight files that are causing it to cycle.
Personally, I would guess it's the hard drive. Disk Utility will not tell you anything about drive problems unless they're terribly obvious. On basic checks all it does is verify the integrity of the system.
What I would do is go to SCSC's web site and download the free demo of Scannerz. It now includes their book Hard Drive Troubleshooting which is for Mac's and it's all free. The demo program will only scan the first 10GB of the hard drive, but Scannerz is fault identification software, meaning surface scans aren't the only things it can analyze. The link to the site is:
http://www.scsc-online.com
I would do the following:
If the scan comes back with any errors or irregularities, rescan it and see if they're repeatable. If they're repeatable you have bad sectors on your drive. If they're not, there's likely a fault somewhere in the system. Their book goes into detail on how to isolate the problems. If you have a surface scan error that's beyond the 10GB range, unfortunately you won't be able to see it. You might want to look at some of their videos of scans on failing drives which you can access from the Scannerz section too.
Good Luck.
- Excessive (very excessive) spotlight indexing
- Drive or drive related problems
You can check spotlight using Activity Monitor. Setup Activity Monitor to list all active applications, not just yours, then sort them by name. If you see the process named mds and it's worker threads which will be named mdworker and the CPU percentage is high then it's spotlight. This was a problem on older (Tiger, Leopard) systems but they've gotten it pretty well cleaned up on Snow Leopard and Lion, unless there's some type of problem with the spotlight files that are causing it to cycle.
Personally, I would guess it's the hard drive. Disk Utility will not tell you anything about drive problems unless they're terribly obvious. On basic checks all it does is verify the integrity of the system.
What I would do is go to SCSC's web site and download the free demo of Scannerz. It now includes their book Hard Drive Troubleshooting which is for Mac's and it's all free. The demo program will only scan the first 10GB of the hard drive, but Scannerz is fault identification software, meaning surface scans aren't the only things it can analyze. The link to the site is:
http://www.scsc-online.com
I would do the following:
- Download the Scannerz Demo under their Scannerz section
- Stop all programs (everything!). It has to be the only thing running
- Run a scan in cursory mode, which will end at 10G (demo limitation)
If the scan comes back with any errors or irregularities, rescan it and see if they're repeatable. If they're repeatable you have bad sectors on your drive. If they're not, there's likely a fault somewhere in the system. Their book goes into detail on how to isolate the problems. If you have a surface scan error that's beyond the 10GB range, unfortunately you won't be able to see it. You might want to look at some of their videos of scans on failing drives which you can access from the Scannerz section too.
Good Luck.
