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Strange Happenings with my 2010 MBP

C

curiousess

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 12, 2012
5
0
boring details: mbp mid-2010, 10.8.2, nothing user installed, coke spilled on the keyboard a while ago but the store said it didn't get into anything sensitive

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I have been having tremendously slow shutdown and boot behavior. Today, after booting, I tried to log in but after putting in my password the computer still hadn't managed to log in fifteen minutes later. I had to eventually manually power down and start over. Programs hang and crash with unusual frequency - I don't do anything fancy to how I set up OS X so I feel like this pretty much never used to happen to me. And now it's a pain to shut down any program. Half the time, it hangs so badly I have to force quit. My activity monitor never reads high CPU usage/disk activity, but the spinning beach ball has become part of my daily work routine.

I've read elsewhere on here this could be an SMC problem, so I reset it following the instructions on Apple.com. It seemed (placebo effect?) to temporarily make things more responsive. But within a day or so it was back to its old sluggish ways. There's definitely something wrong or weird with the system overall, but I have no idea what it is.

Am I being foolhardy using a cola-spilled system for this long? The technician checked out the moisture sensors in it and said they had detected nothing, that the spill had stayed in the keyboard housing. But I'm wondering with this erratic behavior if that has changed somehow.

What I'd really love to know is if there is a much simpler, less expensive solution I'm overlooking that will fix the baby?
 
...

actually weird system hangs are often a result of the hard drive failing which is unlikely to show up in any test. I got a macbook pro awhile back (2010 13" model) from ebay, when it arrived it was displaying beachballing at random and extremely slow performance. The guy who sold it likely didn't know the problem but I immediately reset PRAM and SMC (no help) then replaced the ram (I had some sitting around because my imac has 4 2gb sticks in it) none of which helped. Pulled the hard drive out of a laptop I never use and problem solved. Not sure why this happened you would think a hard drive would just stop working but it isn't always the case
 
I've read elsewhere that could be the problem but the strange thing was I tested it with SMART Utility and nothing showed up...

Should I try the long test instead? Any other ways I could narrow it down to the harddrive?
 
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The smart utility wont show up anything the only way to know is replace the drive, if it doesnt work just return the drive, like i said no test shows up any issues when i had a failing hdd
 
Yeah SMART Utility long test returned no errors.

I'm going to try running a full memtest in single-user mode this weekend.

Any other suggested ways to diagnose the problem?
 
I'm assuming you already did the obvious like running permissions repair and forcing the maintenance routines?
 
I actually haven't run Disk Utility in a while - good idea!

How do I force the maintenance routines?
 
curiousess said:
I actually haven't run Disk Utility in a while - good idea!

How do I force the maintenance routines?
Click to expand...

go to applications->utilities->Terminal

in terminal, type the following, one space between each word

sudo periodic daily

then hit return. You will be prompted for your password and it won't show up when you type it. Just type it and hit return. When you get a new command prompt, it is done with the daily routine. Then type:

sudo periodic weekly

and hit return. You won't need the password this time. This routine will usually take longer, up to 3-4 minutes or longer. When done, run the monthly routine:

sudo periodic monthly

and hit return. This one should be quick. You know it is done when you get a new command prompt.

Don't screw up the sudo commands! :D
 
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