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Installed new ram, possible problems?

C

CanadianDonkey

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 15, 2008
82
0
Hello all!

Today I finally got my shipment of computer upgrades from OWC, YAY!

I now have 4GB of ram, with a 320gb hdd, and a 160 ext drive (just my old drive).

Anyways, I'm not sure the rams working properly. I've noticed that, according to my iStat widget, I have nearly 1.1 GB of active ram being used, and I only have firefox and azurus open! With my old ram, I could have photoshop, fire fox, azurus, limewire, and a dozen other apps open, and I wouldn't even have that much ram being active.

I've also noticed that the computer seems to be running a lot hotter now, I have it sitting on a hard surface, and the fans are running at nearly 6K! Before, I could have the thing sitting on my lap, and it would be about half an hour before the fans kick in.

So... bad ram? or something else?
 
CanadianDonkey said:
Hello all!

Today I finally got my shipment of computer upgrades from OWC, YAY!

I now have 4GB of ram, with a 320gb hdd, and a 160 ext drive (just my old drive).

Anyways, I'm not sure the rams working properly. I've noticed that, according to my iStat widget, I have nearly 1.1 GB of active ram being used, and I only have firefox and azurus open! With my old ram, I could have photoshop, fire fox, azurus, limewire, and a dozen other apps open, and I wouldn't even have that much ram being active.

I've also noticed that the computer seems to be running a lot hotter now, I have it sitting on a hard surface, and the fans are running at nearly 6K! Before, I could have the thing sitting on my lap, and it would be about half an hour before the fans kick in.

So... bad ram? or something else?
Click to expand...

One way to find out is to remove the new memory and replace it with your old modules and see if the problem goes away. And while you're at it, double check the new HDD installation.
 
6k RPM is not normal when you're computer is idle. I can't image that having anything to do with the ram, but it could be your hard disk, or some vent being clogged.
I would take it apart again and see if anything nasty is going on in there.
 
So I swapped the old ram back in, and the problem still exists, so it must be the hard drive that's being screwy. But what exactly could be causing the problem? I don't think I installed it incorrectly... I mean, it seemed pretty fool proof. Or is it just a faulty hard drive?

But if it's faulty... then wouldn't it not work at all?


Hmmm....

Ok, I'm going to turn my computer off, put my new ram back in, and put my old drive back in, and see what happens.
 
Alright, I put my old drive in, and let it sit for twenty minutes, I came back, and it all seems fine. The fans are running at 1.7K, and the cpu temp is a cool 45 degrees (Whereas before, it would skyrocket to nearly 80!)

So... now what? Is my new hard drive faulty? Should I return it (which would probably be a total bitch to do...)?
 
Connect your new drive externally, format it and see if you get any errors (backup your data first). If not re-install the drive, install leopard, update and go from there.
 
It's neither your fan or your harddrive.

Certain web sites has flash ads and content and if enough pages from those sites are open, then it'll make your CPU run at nearly full power, making it hot.

Open Activity Monitor next time your laptop gets hot, show "All Processors", and sort by CPU usage. I suspect it'll be your browser that's taking up the CPU cycles.
 
Is it possible Spotlight is re-indexing because of the new drive? This would make you CPU work overtime and fans run high for a little while.

As someone else suggested, open Activity Monitor and see what is using all your CPU cycles.
 
I'd doubt the hard drive would be related to the fan speed ramping up abnormally - more likely an activity the system is doing that's got the system kicking the fan on. The 320GB 2.5s 5400RPM models we offer today (both WD and Samsung) are power efficient and cooler running even than a lot of the older (1yr+) 5400RPM lower capacity models.

On the memory - OS X uses physical RAM, when available, to increase its own efficiency and over all system performance. Something else - if you have a model that only was spec for 3.0GB of memory - 4GB will be reported and most of the extra 1GB will show allocated under Leopard 10.5.x (like 300MB of it is actually used though) where under 10.4.x it only reported that same 4.0GB config as 3.0GB. FWIW - we've done very extensive memory benchmarking with real-world scenarios:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/apple/memory/Macbook_Memory_Benchmarks

and even in the Core 2 Duo Macs with the 3.0GB Apple Spec limit, 4.0GB does offer a benefit vs. 3.0GB that is definitely a decent ROI with today's memory cost.

Hope this info is helpful. Thanks!
CanadianDonkey said:
Hello all!

Today I finally got my shipment of computer upgrades from OWC, YAY!

I now have 4GB of ram, with a 320gb hdd, and a 160 ext drive (just my old drive).

Anyways, I'm not sure the rams working properly. I've noticed that, according to my iStat widget, I have nearly 1.1 GB of active ram being used, and I only have firefox and azurus open! With my old ram, I could have photoshop, fire fox, azurus, limewire, and a dozen other apps open, and I wouldn't even have that much ram being active.

I've also noticed that the computer seems to be running a lot hotter now, I have it sitting on a hard surface, and the fans are running at nearly 6K! Before, I could have the thing sitting on my lap, and it would be about half an hour before the fans kick in.

So... bad ram? or something else?
Click to expand...
 
Consultant said:
It's neither your fan or your harddrive.

Certain web sites has flash ads and content and if enough pages from those sites are open, then it'll make your CPU run at nearly full power, making it hot.

Open Activity Monitor next time your laptop gets hot, show "All Processors", and sort by CPU usage. I suspect it'll be your browser that's taking up the CPU cycles.
Click to expand...

He's letting it sit idle, as in nothing is open, and he would be having the same problem with his other hard disk had this been the case. My money is on spotlight indexing.
 
BlackMax said:
Is it possible Spotlight is re-indexing because of the new drive? This would make you CPU work overtime and fans run high for a little while.

As someone else suggested, open Activity Monitor and see what is using all your CPU cycles.
Click to expand...

That is a possibility...

I used that Carbon Copy Cloner App, and did a block level copy onto my new drive.... so why would spotlight have to reindex it?

Whatever the case, this seems like the most reasonable possibility, I'll pop my new drive in, and see what's up in activity monitor.


Be right back...
 
Ok.. new hard drive in, checking activity monitor...

There's this thing called ATSSever, and another called mdworker, they're taking up around 20-50% cpu. I've also checked out spotlight, it's taking up less than 1%

So.... ?
 
CanadianDonkey said:
Ok.. new hard drive in, checking activity monitor...

There's this thing called ATSSever, and another called mdworker, they're taking up around 20-50% cpu. I've also checked out spotlight, it's taking up less than 1%

So.... ?
Click to expand...

There you go, mdworker is a spotlight process just let your computer sit for an hour or two and let it do its thing and it'll go away. It's happened to me before.
 
Ok... and whats ATSServer?

And while we're on the topic of processors... what is this "nice" thing that shows up by the user, sys, and idle? it's always at 0.
 
Just a little update here, I've left the computer running for almost two hours now, and the fans and cpu are still going nuts like before.

So, there's the mdworker, which is caused by spotlight indexing my drive, but that's only responsible for 20-30% cpu usage.

The real bugger is ATSServer, which, according to a quick google search, has something to do with managing fonts, and that is taking up a whole 50-60 cpu. What the hell?

Why is it that on my old hard drive, this atsserver isn't really a problem, but on my new one, it's being more annoying than rosie o'donnel?

Confused, I am.
 
Ok.... I think I managed to fix the problem.

I googled around, and it seems that a lot of people (And by a lot, I mean four) were having problems with this ATSServer, and it seems the route of it was them downloading a ton of PDF files. Now... I just happened to have a folder with about 10,000 general computer files on hand... So, opened up spotlight, selected it to exclude that folder from searching... and in a few short minutes, PRESTO! The ATS thing goes away, cpu cools down, fan's slow and all is quiet and right with the world.

So... I don't know why that happened, as I've had those files downloaded on my old drive weeks ago, long before I upgraded the hard drive. I guess there must have been a screw up when I duplicated my hard drive?
 
I am not familiar enough with CCC and Spotlight in terms of impact to functio to give a great answer - but I'd guess something doesn't come through in a clone and/or the OS sees it's got a larger volume and perhaps spotlight does a reindex since volume size parameter doesn't match. FWIW, when I've upgraded to a new drive myself - done a clean install of OSX - and then used Migration Assistant, I do not recall this issue popping up. At the same time - if it did, might have completed faster if the main issue is with PDFs?

Glad there was an answer, it didn't much make sense for the hard drive to have a glitch to cause the problem - if that was the case, something brand new for us to watch out for as it would be a first. :)

Thanks for the update!

CanadianDonkey said:
Ok.... I think I managed to fix the problem.

I googled around, and it seems that a lot of people (And by a lot, I mean four) were having problems with this ATSServer, and it seems the route of it was them downloading a ton of PDF files. Now... I just happened to have a folder with about 10,000 general computer files on hand... So, opened up spotlight, selected it to exclude that folder from searching... and in a few short minutes, PRESTO! The ATS thing goes away, cpu cools down, fan's slow and all is quiet and right with the world.

So... I don't know why that happened, as I've had those files downloaded on my old drive weeks ago, long before I upgraded the hard drive. I guess there must have been a screw up when I duplicated my hard drive?
Click to expand...
 
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