Powerbook Woes

[mcscotch]

I have a 15" 1.25Ghz G4 running Tiger, and I've had it for almost two years, it's run great until about a month ago, when one day it took half an hour to even get to the blue screen. I started getting the beachball all the time, and quicktime movies and iTunes songs have started to shudder a lot. I've run onyX, and it seems to help a bit, and it is loading much faster, but I still can't watch a quicktime movie without it getting hung up every 5 or so minutes, and a lot of times Safari will get the beachball for a couple minutes for no reason, before going back to working normally. Activity monitor shows about 70 wired, 150-200 active, 170-250 inactive, and anywhere from 5-60mb free. Is there any other thing I should try before taking it in?

 

[mad jew]

Go back to Activity Monitor and see if there's a single process that's using up a large amount of resources (CPU and RAM). Also, check Disk Utility to see that your SMART status is verified on your hard drive and maybe start up from the Hardware Test CD to do a basic test of some of the components. Have you got any third party RAM?

 

[mcscotch]

No third party anything, and everything seems to check out, the problems started right after trying to download a movie on acquisition, after the file was downloaded, I tried to play it, but quicktime would open and close without even giving an error message, so I deleted the file, but there have been problems ever since. Any desire I ever had to impress people by having movies before they are released is gone.

 

[mad jew]

When you say it's slow to get to the blue screen, do you mean it's slow before you've even logged in? Are all peripherals unplugged?

I'd normally tell you to make a new account and see if that too is slow but if you're having problems before you even get to your current account, then that would be irrelevant.

Would it be possible to post a screen shot of your activity monitor with All Processes, sorted by CPU usage?

 

[PCMacUser]

I have a 15" 1.25Ghz G4 running Tiger, and I've had it for almost two years, it's run great until about a month ago, when one day it took half an hour to even get to the blue screen. I started getting the beachball all the time, and quicktime movies and iTunes songs have started to shudder a lot. I've run onyX, and it seems to help a bit, and it is loading much faster, but I still can't watch a quicktime movie without it getting hung up every 5 or so minutes, and a lot of times Safari will get the beachball for a couple minutes for no reason, before going back to working normally. Activity monitor shows about 70 wired, 150-200 active, 170-250 inactive, and anywhere from 5-60mb free. Is there any other thing I should try before taking it in?

You could always reformat the hard drive!