MBP Acting Funny Recently (Help Troubleshoot Plz)

[svcghost]

Hey guys,

Recently (past 2 weeks), my MBP has been acting funny. Some symptoms it has had are: after an update was forced to archive and install because was stuck at grey screen with spinning wheel upon reboot (this happened twice in the span of two days).

I am afraid to reboot my computer now. I am up to date 10.6.7 Mac OS X, but I have a Java update that my MBP has reminded me about. I don't want to update that because I fear it will grey screen me.

Computer has been running a bit slow at random times. Sometimes in Firefox I will get wheel of death randomly but will wait it out (about 15 seconds) and it's good. This didn't happen before.

At random times I my drop down menus on the OS will be blank. You know, when you right click something to get more options like "Open With", yeah those menus are white and blank. But then I will click off the menu, then right click again and they will appear again! Weird.

Finally, some times when I open applications they will just be unusable. Like I opened Firefox and I couldn't click the URL bar (no spinning wheel), it just acted like it was unclickable. Had to force quit. This happened with the actual force quit process too. It was just stuck. It also happened with MAMP.


Any troubleshooting tips guys? I have no idea why this has started to happen. Could Firefox 4 be the culprit? Downloaded it a month ago.

Specs: MBP, 13 inch, 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM, 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 10.6.7 OS X

 

[8CoreWhore]

Start with the basics...

Go to Disk Utilities and Verify Disk Permissions. Then Repair if necessary.

Then Verify Disk, and repair if necessary.

It might be necessary to boot to your OS X disc and use Utilities from there.

 

[svcghost]

Start with the basics...

Go to Disk Utilities and Verify Disk Permissions. Then Repair if necessary.

Then Verify Disk, and repair if necessary.

It might be necessary to boot to your OS X disc and use Utilities from there.

already did this on mac and thru cd. both times everything aooeared okay. what next? thx for help!

 

[8CoreWhore]

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964

Read through those...

 

[svcghost]

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964

Read through those...

This is quite strange. Yesterday I figured I'd try Verifying / Repairing disk permissions again even though I did that a week ago with no problems found. This time though a LOT of incorrect permissions were found and fixed. I think they were all in the Applications root. What could have caused these to be incorrect, and could this have fixed my problem? I don't see how incorrect permissions could do so much performance damage to a computer (I assumed it would just consist of rejecting you permission to read or write something for example).

 

[GGJstudios]

Mac OS X: Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions messages that you can safely ignore