OS X performance

[lmcintyre]

recently my mac mini has been slow, Boot up takes forever launching apps takes a long time and when i mouse over anything in the menu bar (volume, airport, time, spotlight) i get a beach ball. going to network in system prefs crashes it and even a force quit still leaves it on my screen. I even got a few kernel panics the other day. I tried repairing permissions but it didnt help. Any ideas?

Thanks

PS: the time in the menu bar doesn't update from the time i booted my mac at

 

[WildCowboy]

Have you changed anything (either software or hardware) on your system recently?

 

[emptyCup]

How full is your hard drive? How much RAM do you have?

 

[Killyp]

1. Make sure at least 10% of your HDD is free. Ideally 10gb if your drive is so small that 10% is less than 10 gb.

2. Repair Permissions (in Disk Utility, select your hard drive and click Repair Permissions).

3. Check to see what's in your login items list. Go into 'Accounts', and then with your user selected, see what's in the LOGIN ITEMS list. Try to keep a maximum of 3 items in there. If anything looks suspicious, or you don't know what it's for, remove it.

4. Back up everything & re-install OS X if none of the above work.

5. If none of the above work, either the hard drive or RAM are faulty. It's also entirely possible the Logic Board has had it (would explain the clock issue), which is a pain.


When I say back up everything, I mean EVERYTHING. Get an external HDD, and take a disk image of the hard drive. Slow performance/kernel panics/certain features not working are a sign of impending hard drive failure. The more you stress a hard drive, the closer it will come to failing, which is why I recommend you back everything up before doing any serious work with it (such as re-installing OS X, which doesn't necessarily mean losing all your work).

Good luck, and keep us posted!

 

[lmcintyre]

the most recent thing i changed was the upgrade to 10.4.10 but, I haven't heard of any one else having these problems.

mac mini 60gb HD about 31GB free 512 MB of ram

 

[Killyp]

Sounds to me like an impending drive failure. Go into Disk Utility, select your HDD on the left (should be top-most option), and tell us what it says about the S.M.A.R.T. Status at the bottom.

 

[lmcintyre]

thanks for helping me out Killyp, The S.M.A.R.T. status says Verified

now that you mention drive problems... I have been getting allot of hard drive noise, I just assumed it was all in my head.

 

[Killyp]

Oh but it is


On a serious note, BACK THAT THING UP! I'm not guaranteeing it's a hard drive failure, but it sounds very similar to every drive failure I've had!

 

[lmcintyre]

oh wow... My mac is offically dead. I'm posting this from my iPhone. When I tried to restart I got a globe indeed of an apple logo. I retried and it worked. Now when I boot up my mouse stops working after a Min then my USB ports atop getting power. If I go into activity monitor I find a process that isn't responding. When I force quit it the menu bar icons and clock go away

 

[lmcintyre]

system ui server is the process that isnt responding. Also kernal_task is using 98% of my cpu

Apple hardware test comes back clean.


Any ideas?

 

[Killyp]

Archive + Install with OS X. Back up the ENTIRE drive first (boot off OS X disk, use Disk Utility to make disk image of hard drive onto external disk) and then use the OS X disk to do an Archive + Install style installation. This should at least keep some of the settings. If this doesn't work, do a complete wipe of the HDD and re-install.

If you want to make 100% sure everything's okay, just wipe the HDD and re-install everything. You can then try manually copying settings across from the back-up.