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Powerbook Beachball, when and why? vs iBook!

Grokgod

Grokgod

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 26, 2002
906
0
Deep within the heart of madness!
Well, after installing 2 gigs of ram, thinking "This is going to scream!"

Well the only thing screaming is me!

Now this may seem to be a small thing but i dont feel so.
Because when i first got the Powerbook i never had this problem.

After reinstalling my entire OS, I am still getting this effect.

Example 1: I start up Safari and right click new tab bar, only to get Beached!
I wait, eyes bulging until the new tab finally shows up!

....But LATER all other right clicks for this function are there right away.
obviously the action is stored in ram.

Example 2: Right click the Hd or anything else and Beachballed! Arrgg
wait for it..... after the first action the right click is ok, again, stored in RAM?

Now why is this happening?
Is this indicative of other simple OS functions running at a reduced rate?

Is it from an OS upgrade?

When i first installed the clean OS before any updates etc.
It ran fantastic!

My girls iBook NEVER does this! She is on 10.3.3
I am on 10.3.5
I can't believe that the iBook is snappier than my Powerbook, makes me see red, :) or white in this case.

Is it RAM? is my new OWC ram not as fast.
Well, i switched out the new for the old, same thing.
After a dozen switch out, I am blurry eyes and confused.

I reinstalled the OS and the whole machine is snappier now, no doubt.
I spent the entire day carefully reinstalling app, checking for slowdown.

Needless to say that I got NO work done yesterday and drove the guys at OWC nuts. Not to mention my partners who were screaming
work now, talk about this later.

Now I realize that i can be rather uhhh irritating and irritated by small things but, hey thats me, and when the flood of chemicals hits my brain as the Beachball hypnotizes me into a fugue state, I have to ask myself
WHY!

What is up here...?
Powerbook users, HELP :D
 
OK, I get the occasional 'ball on my 17" rev A with 1gig RAM, but certainly not too many.

Some thoughts:

Have you got less than 10% left on your system partition?

Have you taken all the RAM except the original out as a test?

Have you repaired your permissions on a regular basis?

Are you connected to a network?

This could be bad RAM, did you get a lot of 'balls before you put the new RAM in?

Are you running any heavy processing in the background (folding, SETI etc.)?
 
Thanks for the reply WinterMute

I wiped the drive clean and reinstalled the OS to try to get rid of the Beach.
So, NO to less than 10 % of drive left, i have 56 gigs of 74 open.

The Beach was gone for a while but after a few app installations it began to reappear.

I have swapped out the new ram for old multiple times and the results are varied but i think mostly the same.

I repaired permissions after I reinstalled about 7 apps

No network connected!

No processing in the BG at all!

thanks for the help!
 
Apple is No help, sadly

I just reinstalled the OS again and the problem is GONE!

Poof! ~ @

Now the question is what app or update will make it reappear?

Is anyone here experiencing this type of BEACH.

If only it was a nude beach or something. :eek:
 
It might be an app hogging the cpu when open, do you notice which apps you have open when you get the 'ball?

It might be worth checking that out.

Otherwise my guess would be bad RAM or a hardware fault, although the fact it disappears after a system re-install tends to point towards the RAM or something conflicting.

Do you tend to have a lot of apps open all the time?
 
Just as a baseline for you (not to rub it in) - I have a 1.5 powerbook with 10.3.5 and all the latest security and other updates. I have 1.5 gig ram, 512 original one stick option from apple, and 1 gig OWC brand. I rarely get the beach ball for anything, even with many things running. I'd have to say it is once in a long while and I don't even remember what the conditions were when it came up. Opening programs and cntrl click is instant. You mentioned right clicking - do you have a third party input device, and could it be having trouble communicating thus making things go slower?
 
I have a 12" PB 1GHz with 768 MB of RAM. I hardly ever get the beachball - in fact I didn't have get it that much in the 3 months I used it with only 256MB of RAM. Plus, until this week when I've got a new external HD for video, I've had less than 5GB free on my 80GB internal drive and I've never reinstalled the OS (in fact, I "upgrade" installed from Jaguar to Panther). My current drive must be fragmented to bits but, if anything, my PowerBook seems much faster now than it was when I first got it.
 
johnnyjibbs said:
I have a 12" PB 1GHz with 768 MB of RAM. I hardly ever get the beachball - in fact I didn't have get it that much in the 3 months I used it with only 256MB of RAM. Plus, until this week when I've got a new external HD for video, I've had less than 5GB free on my 80GB internal drive and I've never reinstalled the OS (in fact, I "upgrade" installed from Jaguar to Panther). My current drive must be fragmented to bits but, if anything, my PowerBook seems much faster now than it was when I first got it.
Click to expand...

Seems faster? You mean Panther seems faster than Jaguar? Of course its faster. The code is optimized better. Plus, Panther will automatically defragment your harddrive from time-to-time.
 
grapes911 said:
Seems faster? You mean Panther seems faster than Jaguar? Of course its faster. The code is optimized better. Plus, Panther will automatically defragment your harddrive from time-to-time.
Click to expand...
Yeah I know, I'm just saying that having a full HD and one rammed full of large video files (Panther only defrags files up to 20MB in size on the fly by the way, not some 10GB ones that I have) and also having less than a gig of RAM which some people swear by would make my computer really slow, going by what a number of people say. Upgrade installs are supposed to be bad news for speed too. I'm merely pointing out that, despite all this, my computer is still fast and so the original poster must have something wrong with his computer.
 
johnnyjibbs said:
Yeah I know, I'm just saying that having a full HD and one rammed full of large video files (Panther only defrags files up to 20MB in size on the fly by the way, not some 10GB ones that I have) and also having less than a gig of RAM which some people swear by would make my computer really slow, going by what a number of people say. Upgrade installs are supposed to be bad news for speed too. I'm merely pointing out that, despite all this, my computer is still fast and so the original poster must have something wrong with his computer.
Click to expand...

I get what you are saying. I don't do too much on my ibook other than mail, web surfing, and minimal programming, but 384MB ram for me. Upgrade installs weren't the best for computers before panther. Most people that I know that upgraded to panther had speed increases.
 
Thanks to everyone for the help and info.

I appreciate DarbyDoggys baseline.
I take it that the OWC ram works well for you, happy to hear that and to hear from a fellow powerbook user. I dont know any others in my small town.

I am using a Tablet Darby, Intuos 2, but I have tested and often use an Apple mouse and retest by Ctl-clicking. It was the same Beached effect.

Also I have NO app working in the background!
Just the Finder and Safari!

well, here I am, where I am AT~

I wiped the drive and reinstalled Pather, not an upgrade, the original disks.

I swiped out the original Apple ram and put in the OWC.

Now as I test it there is NO problem everything is working fine!

SO I am thinking Software or App conflict.

I was at this point on my first reinstall and it was fine then until I went along installing apps.

I installed the production suite, everything fine.
adobe suite all fine.

Somewhere along iLife, flash, apple works, amorphium and toon boom and finally little snitch, the problem arrived.

Now i will have to install very carefully! and test after each installation.

Does anyone still think its hardware or ram after this information?

I am thinking Little Snitch! but i am still testing and looking for the issue to recur. anyone else have trouble with Little snitch or some app that cause the beachball effect after installation? :confused:
 
after about 1 gig there is no real gaines in speed. If believe it been shown a lot of time to start having a negitived effect on speed. Not really noticible but a lot of the time it starts slowing down the computer. Mind you there are something that helps out for that much ram but for the avearage user is gains start droping off. Also a stick of good 512 ram is always faster in CL than 1 gig of Ram. run 2 stick together to get DDR and well and since the stick of 512 are faster than sticks of 1 gig it general faster.

Also you go over 2 sticks of ram and you loose DDR and it starts slowing down
 
Timelessblur~

I found your post confusing but very interesting!

So you are saying that 512 sticks are faster in CL, why?
ANyone else know about this?

Also I realize that the payoff in speed increases is tapered off when you go over 1 gig BUT to actually slow the computer down?

Thats hard to believe or understand, anyone heard of this also.

I remember similar things in windows but on a Mac??

Please explain!

Are you saying its best to have 2 512 sticks?
 
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