My Mac has me pulling me hairs out my head in frustration. I can't figure out what's wrong with the darn thing. I don't know if it's the OS, the hardware, the software, or anything, so I posted this in general.
To sum my problems up: slow. It started months ago. Everything just started to slow down. I'd select a window in any app, and it would come to the front of the screen, but remain greyed out as if it was in the background. The swirling beachball appeared, stayed for a minute, then fianlly, the window would become properly selected. This happened 24/7.
Applications took four times the amount of time to boot up. Text I wrote took a few minutes to show up after I wrote it. MSN had the most noticeable problems. Apart from the window-switching problem and the writing latency, messages would take around 40 seconds to send after I pressed send, recieving messages would slow the whole program down and wouldn't show up for even longer. WHen people signed it, it froze for at least 60 seconds before the new person showed up in my online list and I could continue typing.
And now, many more apps are taking their time. When I open*Safari, the icon bounces in the dock a couple times, settles with the black arrow underneath, but then no window shows up until a few minutes later.
On the topic of Safari, often, when I'm opening it for the first time after logging in, it will unexpectedly quit immediatly after opening. Sometimes it will quit immediatly every time I try to open it afterwards until I restart the computer. Sometimes it opens a window with none of my favourites in the bar, and no history showing up, and no data elsewhere. Often this window is accessed by right clicking Safari in the dock after it has started up but no window has appeared and selecting "Untitles 1" in the menu that appears.
Finder windows lag. Applications are unberably slow. It's very frustrating.
I've repaired permissions, I've scanned for viruses, I even went so far as to delete my account and create a new one. Nothing worked.
The weirdest part: this only affects my user. It's a amily computer, and no one else is affected by this.
I'm running an eMac, 1ghz, superdrive, 512 megs of ram. The results on the computer are the same if only 2 apps are running or 20.
Please help! It would be much appreciated. Hey, if your advice doesn't work, I may still send you my beaten up eMac after I've smashed it to pieces. Maybe you can salvage the RAM.
S.O.S!!!
To sum my problems up: slow. It started months ago. Everything just started to slow down. I'd select a window in any app, and it would come to the front of the screen, but remain greyed out as if it was in the background. The swirling beachball appeared, stayed for a minute, then fianlly, the window would become properly selected. This happened 24/7.
Applications took four times the amount of time to boot up. Text I wrote took a few minutes to show up after I wrote it. MSN had the most noticeable problems. Apart from the window-switching problem and the writing latency, messages would take around 40 seconds to send after I pressed send, recieving messages would slow the whole program down and wouldn't show up for even longer. WHen people signed it, it froze for at least 60 seconds before the new person showed up in my online list and I could continue typing.
And now, many more apps are taking their time. When I open*Safari, the icon bounces in the dock a couple times, settles with the black arrow underneath, but then no window shows up until a few minutes later.
On the topic of Safari, often, when I'm opening it for the first time after logging in, it will unexpectedly quit immediatly after opening. Sometimes it will quit immediatly every time I try to open it afterwards until I restart the computer. Sometimes it opens a window with none of my favourites in the bar, and no history showing up, and no data elsewhere. Often this window is accessed by right clicking Safari in the dock after it has started up but no window has appeared and selecting "Untitles 1" in the menu that appears.
Finder windows lag. Applications are unberably slow. It's very frustrating.
I've repaired permissions, I've scanned for viruses, I even went so far as to delete my account and create a new one. Nothing worked.
The weirdest part: this only affects my user. It's a amily computer, and no one else is affected by this.
I'm running an eMac, 1ghz, superdrive, 512 megs of ram. The results on the computer are the same if only 2 apps are running or 20.
Please help! It would be much appreciated. Hey, if your advice doesn't work, I may still send you my beaten up eMac after I've smashed it to pieces. Maybe you can salvage the RAM.
S.O.S!!!
