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robertaldulea

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Hi there! I'm new to this forum and I will try to explain what's happening to my iMac lately. I am really upset and desperate about this issue so please HELP!!!

I've switched to mac around December and everything was working so fine till 5 days ago. First I can say I have the 24'' 3.06 processor 4 gb of ram and 500 gb hdd from which 40 gb free space.

5 days ago I've noticed that when I was watching movies with vlc the program was pausing, chocking and I was soLving the issue by ff a few seconds. The next couple of days was the same and I've noticed as well that mac os x v.10.5.7 was loading slower and slower. Last night I've restarted and the startup screen came up with the apple logo and the little dots circle that was showing it's loading. Waited more than one hour and nothing happened. Restarted with the mac os install disc and went to disk utility. Done the disk verify - all ok, no problems. Did the permissions verify and found some of them but after I did the repair permissions I did another verify and was finding the same problems. Anyway shut down everything got upset. Restarted this morning and I took like 10 min to load up and finally the icons showing up. But now evrything I do the beachball is keep spinning and when it stop and I try to click something it's spinning again. For ex I've deleted an icon from dock in 3 min, i've openned a finder window in 5 min, I'm trying to install onyx.dmg and I've clicked like 10 min ago and it's still loading. 🙁(( Btw I have the windows as well in another partition and everything is working fine there as it supossed to work.
Can anybody help??? I dunno what to do... Was thinking to reinstall mac os from the disk but I don't have anything backed up! On the cd install says that I can reinstall mac os as duplicate and will put the old one in a separate folder or something but I still don't know if will erase all my data!
Can anybody help?
Thank you.
 
Not sure if it will help, but have you tried resetting the PRAM?

LINK

Among other things it will reset your:

* Virtual memory
* RAM disk
* Disk cache

And to me it sounds like it's a "memory" issue. 🙂
 
On the cd install says that I can reinstall mac os as duplicate and will put the old one in a separate folder or something but I still don't know if will erase all my data!

If you use the archive and install feature on the disk. you won't lose any of your own files or installed programs!!
 
Unfortunately, it could be a failing hard drive.

I had similar problems recently. Not knowing what it was and guessing it had to do with hidden files, caches, etc I decided to do a clean install. It took over 3 hours to run the installation. Then once I finally had it installed, It'd take more than a minute just to get the "About This Mac" window to show up. I couldn't do more than one thing at a time and it was extremely slow. So I looked into it and saw that others having similar issues discovered it was a failing hard drive. I looked up how to replace the hard drive, went out and bought a new one and 2 hours later had a new hard drive installed and the OS reinstalled. This baby runs fast now.
 
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