Having stability issues in snow leopard

[mossme89]

I'm running 10.6.3 Snow Leopard on my 2008 MBP. At first it worked great, but with an occasional beach ball. But it's gotten worse. Now i can't do anything if i have more than 3 pages of safari open, it just beach balls or freezes. If i have iMovie open and am working on a project, it beach balls every time i try to navigate the project (with 480 X 320 H.264 video!) Plus everything else freezes so much and then just spazzes out when the computer comes to. Its so annoying! I don't have much stuff on here, only about 20 or so apps plus the stock apps (most i dont use that much but keep because i occasionally use it), plus like 40GB/185GB available on the partition.

Im thinking about doing a clean install of Leopard (10.5.8), and just loading the minimum of what i need. Leopard is older, so it's more stable right? I didnt have this many issues on Leopard...

 

[Ice Cream Man]

Load and run OnyX.

Did you load 10.6 over 10.5? or was it a clean install?

Are there any third party programs that run in the background like Growl? Microsoft mouse driver, logitech, Divx?

You might open the Activity Monitor for a while and observe what is using the most RAM and CPU time.

It's probably a software thing, but i wouldn't rule out a bad fan, or something causing it to overheat and slow.

 

[mossme89]

could be the heat. Come to think of it, i only really hear the fan if it is on for hours, plus the black bezel on top is usually very warm. Not to hot to touch, but it is very hot if you touch it.

I downloaded SMC fan control and am now running the fans at 4000RPM to cool it off. The temperature before i started the fans was about 67 degrees C, is that too hot?

 

[Ice Cream Man]

I use SMC sometimes too. It's really helpful on the lappy when it's plugged in and doing something intense. I wouldn't worry about being able to hear it so much, they're pretty quiet fans compared to say, PCs. But if you kick it up a few hundred rpm from default it may help.

Apple chips run hot, but i don't like being over 70c if i can avoid it. But like right now with the fan at 2krpm i'm a 41c on the lappy. If it's a desktop i can see it running higher than a laptop though, my desktop is usually in the 60-70 range i think.

But check out those other things too, Activity Monitor(in the utilities folder) is really handy for tracking down background tasks that are hogging resources. And OnyX is really great for cleaning up, clearing caches, running scripts, and some hidden settings.