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Mac Mini slowing to a halt...

K

keeno

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 20, 2011
14
0
Hi all,

Wondered if anyone had any advice. I have had my current Mac Mini since March 2010, it only gets used for "normal" home computing uses like internet, iTunes, word processing etc but also has Logic on. Nothing intensive (that's what the MBPro's for).

It's recently started getting really slow. Start-up takes 4-5 minutes, and it 'beach balls' whenever I do anything, from opening Finder to opening Chrome etc. Everything causes it to stop working.

My knowledge of these things is limited, I've repaired disk and permissions, cleared lots of old rubbish off the machine and minimised the number of things opening on start-up, but it's still like a dinosaur. It's just weird it's come out of nowhere.

Anyone got any tips for someone not too technical? I'll be getting a new one when they come out but it'd be nice to keep this one working as a little media centre or similar.

Thanks
 
my 2010 server has done this a few times, I look at the logs and there is a hang detect message, but cant figure out why its doing it. it did it even with a pretty bare load on it of just eyetv and a few other multi media apps that lots of mac people use with no issues.

it seems to generate network traffic at the same time causing everything else to slow down as well.


I havent put much time into trying to figure it out.
 
HP Printer driver for a networked printer? This caused issues with my GF's MBP
 
Unfortunately it could be a lot of things, but my first guess is a hard drive is going bad.
 
paulrbeers said:
Unfortunately it could be a lot of things, but my first guess is a hard drive is going bad.
Click to expand...

This is what I'm worried about! Oh well, I guess I'll just wait for the new ones.

Thanks for your time
 
update on mine, it continued to have issues. we took a power hit last friday as part of the big northeast power outage (although ours was only about 30 seconds), and it just kept giving me the spinning wheel. tried to rebuild with disk warrior, and it said the drive was damaged. went and bought 2 new drives, took a deep breath and cracked it open. wasnt too bad to do, since it was the server, i had to get a little more into it to get to the 2nd drive.

had it back up last night, and we will see if it has any issues now....im keeping my fingers crossed. it got so bad a few weekends ago when the wife and I were trying to watch a movie on plex that I just went to best buy and got a base i5 mini. I had been wanting to add a 3rd mini for a while, so it was just an excuse....lol
 
If you back up (clone) your mini, have your mini start up from the external drive. If it boots up fine, your internal hard drive is about to bite the dust. Make sure nothing is connected when firing it up.
Have also wiped the internal (after cloning) and installed a fresh OS only to verify a bad disk. Time consuming but helps pinpoint the issue.
 
Check your activity monitor (in Apps->Utilities), sort by "% CPU" and see if anything is around 100%. If not, check Console, search for "i/o" and see if there are any "i/o errors" --> this would indicate a bad hard drive. You can also try running the apple hardware test by starting the computer holding "d" if it's relatively new, or booting from the apple hardware test disc that came with your Mac.
 
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