I have no idea what's going on but I'm hoping someone could give me some advice here before I give up and take my machine in for repairs.
About two weeks ago,I started getting beach balls all the time, as in once every few minutes whenever I was doing anything. Even sending an email often froze my machine with a spinning beach ball for a minute or so at a time. This is without having tons of windows open and applications running. My machine has 4gigs of ram and all of a sudden it seemed like I had nearly no memory at all. Opening Activity Monitor, I saw that the CPU jumped ceiling-high during these freezes.
Shortly after, the white light on the front-right of the machine that pulses to indicate when sleep mode is active simply stopped working and has not lit up since.
I tried doing a time machine backup the other day but within a few minutes, I got an indication that the backup failed (my external drive is in perfect condition, and I used it to backup my iMac later that same day).
On top of it all, my trackpad stopped registering hard clicks nine times out of ten. I've got my machine set for click-to-tap so this is mostly only a problem when I'm starting up and need to select my profile. I actually posted about the trackpad issue the other day.This also makes it impossible to highlight text for copy & paste. If I click the pad repeatedly, within ten seconds or so, it will register the click, so I would normally think this indicated a hardware issue, but seeing this happen alongside all this other bizarre behaviour makes me think it's possibly software.
Has anyone got any ideas as to what this all could be? I'm on Lion and the OS is up to date. Seriously hoping it's not a hardware problem as I've only been using the machine lightly as my portable rig, with my iMac being the machine that sees most of the work here.
About two weeks ago,I started getting beach balls all the time, as in once every few minutes whenever I was doing anything. Even sending an email often froze my machine with a spinning beach ball for a minute or so at a time. This is without having tons of windows open and applications running. My machine has 4gigs of ram and all of a sudden it seemed like I had nearly no memory at all. Opening Activity Monitor, I saw that the CPU jumped ceiling-high during these freezes.
Shortly after, the white light on the front-right of the machine that pulses to indicate when sleep mode is active simply stopped working and has not lit up since.
I tried doing a time machine backup the other day but within a few minutes, I got an indication that the backup failed (my external drive is in perfect condition, and I used it to backup my iMac later that same day).
On top of it all, my trackpad stopped registering hard clicks nine times out of ten. I've got my machine set for click-to-tap so this is mostly only a problem when I'm starting up and need to select my profile. I actually posted about the trackpad issue the other day.This also makes it impossible to highlight text for copy & paste. If I click the pad repeatedly, within ten seconds or so, it will register the click, so I would normally think this indicated a hardware issue, but seeing this happen alongside all this other bizarre behaviour makes me think it's possibly software.
Has anyone got any ideas as to what this all could be? I'm on Lion and the OS is up to date. Seriously hoping it's not a hardware problem as I've only been using the machine lightly as my portable rig, with my iMac being the machine that sees most of the work here.
