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MacBook has been great untill now.. problems. answers?

L

laughingbabe16

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 2, 2006
80
0
Okay, so i've had my macbook for a good 3 months, but now I seem to be running into problems.

1) My computer has been acting really slow lately. I have a 512 MB HD and 1 GB memory.(i believe so). I haven't added any new programs since I got the computer, and I've been doing the regular updates when it calls for it. Can anyone make any sense out of this??

2) In the2 weeks, my computer froze. I don't know why, its never happened before. Maybe my hard drive is full? I've also noticed that when saving documents from microsoft word on my flash drive, sometimes the computer will free as well. I know for certain my flast drive isn't full and this has never before happened. Thoughts?


3) Today, I took a nap, when I got up, my computer was running but not on! Totally bizarre. It must have been running for a good 2 hrs bc now my battery needs re-charging. I don't think its normal for the laptop to restart itself shortly after shut-down??
----

Random questions:

1) Were the batteries for all macbooks re-called? ever since that newstory about the guys Dell blowing up in his car, freaks me out when my computer gets hot.

2) Would I be able to upgrade my H.D. to a 1gb without losing information?

THANKS!!
 
You must be confused. Do you mean 100 GB? Not many hard drives are 1 GB these days. your machine probably has 512 mb of ram.
 
macbook battaries were not recalled to the best of my knowledge, only g4 ibooks and powerbooks i believe

if you back up your hard drive to dvds or cds then no you wont lose info. if you don't then yes you will. also i think you are confusoing the ram size with the hard drive size. macbooks come stock at a minimun with 60gigs of hd space and 512mb of ram.

you can change the ram without losing data though
 
ok.
Go to Applications->Utilities->Activity Monitor

Take a screenshot of the window with the System Memory tab selected and another with Disk Usage selected (screenshot= shift+apple+4 and click, hold and drag your mouse over the window you want to capture). Then, post the screenshots here. That will tell us what your RAM and HD state is.

Describe the freezing. Do you get a message or does the computer just stop responding?

The computer is unlikely to start on its own (unless you've got a poltergeist, in which case I can't help:D ). It could be that it is set to wake up at a particular time or it could be that it didn't completely shut down even though you thought it did (I've done that before).

Finally, did you install the recent MacBook firmware revision?

You could be having hardware issues, but let's go this route first...

yt
 
My computer says that I have:

2 GHz Intel Core Duo - Processor

1 GB 667 MHz - Memory

60GB Serial ATA drive - Hard Drive. I believe. How do I make sure this is correct?

I just installed all new software updates yesterday.

My computer seems to freeze when I am either saving a document on my flash drive or on my in documents folder.

Okay-- So if my computer did not shut down all the way, how do I make sure it does?

I know on windows computers, you can go to My Computer and check how much space you have left on your H.D. Is this possible on MacBooks? Will it give me a graph to visually see how much space is left and how much has been used?

THANKS BUNCHES!!
 
laughingbabe16 said:
60GB Serial ATA drive - Hard Drive. I believe. How do I make sure this is correct?
Click to expand...

Click the icon of the hard drive (If you haven't changed it, it would probably by Macintosh HD), and press Command (the apple button next the keyboard-it doesn't matter which one) + I. It will bring up a window titled Macintosh HD Info. Look down to where it says capacity; it should say something around 55 GB (mine says 55.57 GB).

laughingbabe16 said:
I know on windows computers, you can go to My Computer and check how much space you have left on your H.D. Is this possible on MacBooks? Will it give me a graph to visually see how much space is left and how much has been used?
Click to expand...

This can be done in Activity Monitor as well. Go to Applications->Utilities->Activity Monitor, and click the Disk Usage button near the bottom. Something like this should appear:
picture1sn3.th.jpg


To your problem of your computer running slow, do you turn it off overnight? The Mac OS has some maintenance scripts it runs early in the morning when the computer is on. There are scripts which run daily, weekly and monthly. Turning your computer off means those scripts can't run, so your computer runs slower as a result. The scripts will still run if the computer is sleeping.

Hope that helps! :)
 
laughingbabe16 said:
My computer seems to freeze when I am either saving a document on my flash drive or on my in documents folder.

Okay-- So if my computer did not shut down all the way, how do I make sure it does?

I know on windows computers, you can go to My Computer and check how much space you have left on your H.D. Is this possible on MacBooks? Will it give me a graph to visually see how much space is left and how much has been used?
Click to expand...

If you go to the activity monitor as I suggested, that will give a picture of whether you are running at capacity or not. Since you thought you might be running on low resources..

There could be a problem with the flash drive, but you mean to say that if you save documents to any folder other than your documents folder, it doesn't freeze? Are you saving from any particular program? i.e. from a PPC program like word?

Also, have you tried repairing permissions? To do that, go to Applications->Utilities->Disk Utility and click repair permissions (no reason to do the verify permissions thing.).

As for shutting down. After you click shutdown, make sure and wait until the light on the front has gone out. I've closed the lid too soon before on mine and it did not finish the shut down process. It was also cranky and I needed to restart.

Just thought: another thing to do would be to go to console in the utilities folder after a crash and check out the crash report. There might be some info there too.

yt
 
Thanks everyone!

I also deleted a ton of pictures and documents in my documents folder and on my desktop as well as uninstalling a program I never used for my spanish class. It seems to working faster. :)

Just gotta do something about that flash drive. perhaps its filled with junk. heh.
 
I have noticed that with flash drives formatted as FAT32(MS-DOS file system) it will sometimes freeze my computer up for a moment. Try going to Applications --> Utilities --> Disk Utility and click on the name of your flash drive (the lower one). If it shows that it is MS-DOS format (and you don't need windows compatability) then reformat it as Mas OS extended (make sure to back everything up first).
 

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