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OSX lagging

F

FrankieTDouglas

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Mar 10, 2005
1,554
2,882
I have a 15" Powerbook with 1.5 gigs of ram. It's the latest revision model.

Up until now, it has been working flawlessly. But on Friday, while burning a data dvd, it started lagging up on me. Even after a restart, things were lagging up while trying to open. Periodically since then, things have been running slower and I've been getting the beach-ball in everything from Safari to Preview to Mail to iPhoto to Photoshop. I'm wondering if there's anything I can reset, clear, or etc, to get this thing out of the funk and back to running smoothly?

Thanks.
 
Perhaps try running the usual set of maintenance routines: Permission repair, cron jobs, etc.
 
The standard response to these questions seems to be "Repair Permissions", so that's my first suggestion.

My second suggestion is that you have a look in Activity Monitor and see if there are any processes that are taking up a lot of CPU% or RAM. It's amazing how much RAM my Widgets took up before I realised I didn't actually need about 25 of them and turned them off :eek:.
 
Feel free to slap me if this is insultingly self-explanatory but you know that OSX isn't like Windows in that clicking on the red button wont quit the app but rather just close the window. Sorry if that's just plain rude. :eek:

Otherwise, as everyone else says, see what Activity Monitor says.
 
Ah yeah, quite familiar with that aspect of the red dots. Very fond of it, actually.

Activity monitor is showing 27% user CPU, 73% system CPU.

Currently, everything's acting as it should. Just been strange in the most recent few days. I dunno... picture having 256 megs of ram and all of your apps open, then trying to do something in one of them. That's what the experience has been like.
 
Sorry, you mentioned a restart anyway which would have quit all the apps.

You're RAM is being recognised, right? This is really weird if Activity Monitor thinks things are cool. :confused:
 
Okay, Finder is bouncing between 70 and 80 in the % CPU column. That doesn't even look right. How do I go about reducing this?
 
FrankieTDouglas said:
Okay, Finder is bouncing between 70 and 80 in the % CPU column. That doesn't even look right. How do I go about reducing this?
Click to expand...

My Finder process sits on 0.00%. So obviously something's up. Unfortunately I have no idea what :(
 
Friday I attempted to network my computer with someone else's via ethernet. Her computer had problems showing up, so we disbanded that idea and I began the dvd burning.

It seems like a good answer, minus the fact that I have since restarted the computer a few times.
 
FrankieTDouglas said:
Friday I attempted to network my computer with someone else's via ethernet. Her computer had problems showing up, so we disbanded that idea and I began the dvd burning.

It seems like a good answer, minus the fact that I have since restarted the computer a few times.
Click to expand...

This was almost certainly the problem. Even on a restart the Finder often seems to try and re-connect to servers it was connected to. If it cannot find them it tends to max the CPU for ages. I've not seen this under Tiger (yet) but used to see it in Panther. Perhaps it's time for an upgrade :)
 
gekko513 said:
Maybe it was Spotlight indexing your files?
Click to expand...

You are right gekko513, i was having the same problems but under Tiger 10.4.2
I tried everything until i went looking for something in Spotlight,
it said it is indexing my computer ...thus the slowdown I guess!
I installed the 3 CS2 trials and I guess that it has to index them,
I have about 20 Gigs on my G5, how long would this take?
Thanks
R
 
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