Mini Server 10.6.8 spinning wheel of death

[scrappy246]

This is the first time I've posted here and it feels like a race against time as I'm dodging the spinning wheel of frustration which i know will return very soon. A couple of weeks ago i noticed my mac running slower....then slower, then so very slow that it took half an hour just to open firefox with nothing else running. I installed MacKeeper for £30 and cleaned to '100% perfect' but to no avail. i repaired permissions with the disc utility on both partitions of the drive although I only use the one. The problem all the time was becoming worse. I literally have to wait minutes for anything from opening a folder (not even running an application) to launching my email. I have backed up 30 gig from my hard drive onto an external drive - has taken days to process, also I've been binning a lot (roughly 10GB took 24hrs). I have no files on my desktop now either. There has been some improvement I think (not entirely sure) but not a lot. I have no idea what's going on but the spinning wheel appears to be running the show. I don't have a backup Snow leopard disc as my mini came with it pre-installed (20 months ago).

Can anybody help?
Thanks for your time

 

[Mr.C]

I would suggest re-installing the OS. I don't know why your Mini didn't come with a recovery disc. Even though the OS is pre-installed you should have still got that. As far as I'm aware all computers do.

 

[MJL]

This is the first time I've posted here and it feels like a race against time as I'm dodging the spinning wheel of frustration which i know will return very soon. A couple of weeks ago i noticed my mac running slower....then slower, then so very slow that it took half an hour just to open firefox with nothing else running. I installed MacKeeper for £30 and cleaned to '100% perfect' but to no avail. i repaired permissions with the disc utility on both partitions of the drive although I only use the one. The problem all the time was becoming worse. I literally have to wait minutes for anything from opening a folder (not even running an application) to launching my email. I have backed up 30 gig from my hard drive onto an external drive - has taken days to process, also I've been binning a lot (roughly 10GB took 24hrs). I have no files on my desktop now either. There has been some improvement I think (not entirely sure) but not a lot. I have no idea what's going on but the spinning wheel appears to be running the show. I don't have a backup Snow leopard disc as my mini came with it pre-installed (20 months ago).

Can anybody help?
Thanks for your time

If that's the case I am suspicious of your HDD starting to fail.

I normally replace my HDD every 18 months after I read some studies done by Google on their x00,000's HDD.

If you have no need to run server then might as well just run the normal desktop version. Snow Leopard is still for sale through the online shop last time I checked.