Snow Leopard is Slow, Hangs and Generally Not Working Quite Right

[northy124]

Hey guys,

Recently Snow Leopard has become one slow ass OS, and I originally though it was because I was going low on HDD Space I was at 11GB free, went and deleted a lot of stuff and it was still slow, currently on 13GB, but it doesn't seem to of been that.

I am now thinking it may have something to do with deleting the preference files for Spotlight because it wasn't working correctly (but that made it worse, won't find Apps).

But I am not sure if that is it either, CPU is not really used much either, and all that is happening is Beach Balls 24/7 so is there anything I can do to find the root cause of the issue before doing a fresh install of Snow Leopard (which will take hell of a lot of time as I need to ask my parents to send it back, so would rather there is a fix without reinstallation).

Northy

 

[MacDawg]

Sounds like you could probably benefit from a lot of things

How large is your HDD?
Having 13 GB is not a lot of free space to work with unless you have a very small HDD

Yes, if you have mucked around in the system from time to time as you say, a fresh install of SL might be in order as well

 

[northy124]

My HDD is 120GB, I was thinking that it would be better to do the fresh install right of the bat but I have to wait a week or two for the Family Edition to be sent back to me :/ so that is why I wondered if I can do anything without the need but today it seems to be the worse and it looks like the CPU isn't even being used at all for anything would could explain a lot

 

[mmomega]

Format, reinstall fresh and/or just buying a new hard drive.

How old is that thing anyway, the hard drive and what is it in ?

 

[northy124]

Two years I'd say.

I guess it will be a fresh install then, kind of wanted to avoid but if I can't then I can live with it

 

[Consultant]

Do you do torrents?

 

[northy124]

Do you do torrents?

No, Usenet

Could the constant unraring have something to do with my issues?

 

[Fuchal]

I had this issue and the fault was Spotlight. You can try forcing Spotlight to reindex your drive by typing this in Terminal:

sudo mdutil -E /

 

[duky]

I hope you haven't said this in your post because I can't see it anywhere but what machine are you using?

I would also say do a fresh install, and restore from backup (just files/docs/prefs, but not system settings)

 

[Consultant]

No, Usenet

Could the constant unraring have something to do with my issues?

Probably not unrar.

Few things:
1. You don't have a lot of free space
2. It's likely that you might be using large files that are too big for the OSX built in defrag. However the rar pieces are usually within the defrag sizes though.
3. Could be hardware issue (harddrive going to fail?)

Few things to do:
Backup
Create new test account, see if it's problematic under that
Archive and install

 

[northy124]

I had this issue and the fault was Spotlight. You can try forcing Spotlight to reindex your drive by typing this in Terminal:

sudo mdutil -E /

Tried that, got told indexing was disabled :/

Probably not unrar.

Few things:
1. You don't have a lot of free space
2. It's likely that you might be using large files that are too big for the OSX built in defrag. However the rar pieces are usually within the defrag sizes though.
3. Could be hardware issue (harddrive going to fail?)

Few things to do:
Backup
Create new test account, see if it's problematic under that
Archive and install

Will try the test account thing now

 

[WiscoNicky]

snow leopard ran pretty sluggishly when I UPGRADED from leopard. a fresh install solved all my problems with Snow Leopard and now it runs beautifully.

Yes larger HDD is a must, and there is a chance it is dying. My internal HDD recently was found to have bad blocks (which I swapped for a warranty replacement). Prior to that, the OS and apps were hanging frequently.

Back up your data and do a clean install.

 

[northy124]

I have just done the 10th restart today (after it froze in the new account and did nothing) and it appears that it has done the trick it doesn't seem to hang thus far but I do think I'll do a Fresh Install in a couple of days time anyway also Spotlight is working.

Thanks for the help guys

Must remember that switching it off at least 10 times sorts it