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WSU-Architect

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 14, 2008
35
0
My Mac Pro (specs in sig) has recently been really quite slow. Opening Safari and Adium and iTunes all at once causes repeated beachballs, as does opening new tabs, switching back and forth from expose' etc. I use onyx and take very good care of my equipment, but am admittedly tech-lame about how to speed it up. It also hangs in photoshop quite a lot, and although the files are large (1-5GB) it seems to do so overly much. My own thoughts lend me to think that I need to purchase another harddrive to use a scratchdisk, but I'm not really sure. Hopefully someone with a little more knowledge can help me out, I'd be happy to provide any more information needed. Its just frustrating that my extremely expensive computer hangs on such simple tasks that my 5 year old crap laptop flys through. Thanks in advance.
 
are you having page-outs? open utilities -> activity monitor, then check for page outs. if you're having a ton of page outs, you could use more RAM. And it's always a good idea to have a scratch disk, but that may not be your problem.

with activity monitor, take a look at your list of processes, and see if any of them is "misbehaving", ie. using up a LOT of your CPU, like 100% or more.

try these steps and report back.
 
Hard to diagnose, but i'd definitely start with a clean hard system hard drive if at all possible since you're having problems not just with photoshop but with other stuff.

i know it's a pain, but i think it would be time worth spent to diagnose: build a new startup disk from scratch and see if the machine perks up: i'm almost certainly it well...sounds like a corrupted system or heavily fragmented hard drive, but those are just wild guesses
 
Whats a virus :p No, you don't have a virus because they can't affect OS X. Have you installed anything new recently? Also how much space on your HD do you have left? If it is nearing capacity those things can happen.

Is it as slow after a restart? A good thing to do is have Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder) open to the CPU tab and while you get the spinning beachballs look for any applications that might cause unusually high CPU spikes.
 
could have a virus? or the hdd might be dying or its just getting slow :/

A virus.... these are macs genius we don't get those




(there are like 1 or 2 but all they do is stuff that makes you laugh, like makes your dock react to the accelerometer in the macbook to make your dock fall over.)
 
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