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I thought it was only me because of my crappy Mac..

Hummer

Hummer

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 3, 2006
1,012
0
Queens, New York NY-5
My friend has a maxed out Macbook and she has the issue of randomly closing apps and random freezing just as I do, except with her she has plenty of free ram and the load on the CPU is minimal. Just at random times whichever program she's working in will freeze up and beach ball or it will crash.

I have these problems too which I never had before doing a clean install of OS X, and I was even using folding apps before, but it's only now that I'll get random freezing and at any one time I'll have open Mail, Photoshop, Adium, Firefox and sometimes Ps. I'll be typing in Adium and all of a sudden someone will IM me and then it'll take 10 minutes for Adium to stop beach balling. Now me I can understand it happening as I only have 512 ram and a 1.33 single processor. But she has a 2.16 ghz core 2 duo with 2 gigs of ram and no combination of her applications come close to half of these resources.

Could anyone help me out with what to tell her .
 
The one thing you didn't mention was the size of your hard discs and how full they were. Before my 603e Power Mac took it's last breath, it was painfully slow because the 1.2 GB hard disc (oh the shame!) was nearly full and virtual memory took up what was left. The CPU was forever dumping stuff into virtual memory, which was fragmented across the hard drive meaning minutes of the beach ball and chronic grinding of the hard drive.

If she is still on system 9, go into the memory manager and try reducing the VM since it sounds like she's plenty of RAM. Not sure if you can do it on MacOS X. Maybe time to burn it onto a DVD or buy an external drive?

*Edit*
Sorry it's a Macbook and not an iBook so definitely not System 9! Apologies.
 
OS X prefers 30% free space on the disk. It downright demands more than 10%.

If you or her have less than that amount of free space it will do exactly what you're describing.

I've had it happen to me.

Cheers.
 
vanmacguy said:
OS X prefers 30% free space on the disk. It downright demands more than 10%.

If you or her have less than that amount of free space it will do exactly what you're describing.

I've had it happen to me.

Cheers.
Click to expand...

That solves my problem, but not hers with a nearly 200 gig hard drive. and only 7 gigs of virtual mem.
 
Hummer said:
That solves my problem, but not hers with a nearly 200 gig hard drive. and only 7 gigs of virtual mem.
Click to expand...

Could she have a networking issue? Clutching at straws here, but I've had times when my network dropped and OS X was so busy trying to reestablish a connection to my iDisk that it seemed to just hang. Then when it decided it finally couldn't connect to iDisk, everything was back to normal.

Does she have these problems when she's off line?

Cheers.
 
Fuzzy14 said:
OK, it's a 200 gig hard drive, but do you have 190 gig on it?
Click to expand...


She has 87.65 gigs of hard drive space free. Her hard drive was originally 111 gigs.

She's barely ever off line as her whole campus is connected so when she's not connected through Ethernet she's connected wirelessly.

Her virtual mem is 7 gigs according to the screen shot she sent me of her activity monitor.
 
Even if it may be time to send her to the Apple Store and see if they have some fix, I'd still be interested to hear more about what people think could be the cause of such problems.

Random freezing apps so often certainly isn't the norm for most Mac users, so something must be wrong. I'm thinking it could be bad RAM, because that can explain the randomness.

Whatever is wrong it would be useful to try and isolate the issue by removing possible problem sources one by one.

To test if it's memory, remove all RAM except one chip, use the Mac for a while and see if it still happens. If it still happens, switch to another chip. If it still happens it's not a RAM issue (or more chips than one have issues).

To test if it has something to do with user settings, create a new user account and try that out for a while.

I can't think of more possible causes that can be tested for at the moment, maybe someone else have more ideas?
 
vanmacguy said:
OS X prefers 30% free space on the disk. It downright demands more than 10%.

If you or her have less than that amount of free space it will do exactly what you're describing.

I've had it happen to me.

Cheers.
Click to expand...

Interesting, I get the SBBOD (Spinning Beach Ball Of Death) on occasion, but it seems to be mainly in Safari. I was just blaming it on the web site I was browsing, or on the fact that Im using the 3.0 Beta, but I just looked, and I have 33Gb free on my 139GB partition. Which comes out to 24% free space. Do you think this would cause any "SBBODs"? I was under the impression that anything above 10% free space was fine.
 
todd2000 said:
Interesting, I get the SBBOD (Spinning Beach Ball Of Death) on occasion, but it seems to be mainly in Safari. I was just blaming it on the web site I was browsing, or on the fact that Im using the 3.0 Beta, but I just looked, and I have 33Gb free on my 139GB partition. Which comes out to 24% free space. Do you think this would cause any "SBBODs"? I was under the impression that anything above 10% free space was fine.
Click to expand...
Safari also freezes up on me from time to time. I think that's more of a Safari issue than OS X issue.
 
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