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Expose and dock freezing on 10.5.4

M

moejorris

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 5, 2008
3
0
Hi

I have a macbook pro running 10.5.4 with 2.4ghz processor and 2gb ram - and I have a problem... After a few hours of running it - no matter what applications I use (sometimes just Firefox, skype, finder, others maybe that + itunes, garageband), eventually the expose will get slower & slower till it doesn't work at all and the dock freezes so clicking on it does nothing - even if I shut applications down they still appear open and if I have minimised something, I cannot then open it again - and cmd + tab doesn't work either. Most importantly, my beloved freecell on the dashboard slows & stutters to a halt!

So this means if I want to switch between applications, I have to keep all the windows open and drag the front window out of the way so I can click on the one I want. Rebooting generally fixes it, but then starts all over again. And the cycle seems to be getting shorter.

Could this be an overheating issue? I've read up about the heating problems and it does get very hot, but none of what I read mentioned this affecting the software...

Joe
 
This sounds like you have a rogue app somewhere eating your resources. When things get slow, have a look in Activity Monitor (in the applications/utilities folder) and see if anything is high on CPU.

Also have a look in Console (found in the same place as Activity Monitor) to see if any programs are recording errors/crashes
 
Okay thanks. I just started running Activity Monitor and right now it's saying the Dock is taking up 240+mb in eal memory - is this normal? Seems very high... Will keep monitoring as it slows down.

Joe
 
20 mins later and it's up to 444mb... I think I have found the problem! Now I just need the fix...
 
Do you have any apps in the Dock that have some sort of message showing?
Mail has it (mail unread count) and so does transmission. There might be some other app that's causing the problem.

Try restarting or opening terminal and typing

'killall Dock' to see if that brings the memory usage down (before opening any apps!)
 
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