very weird problem, help!

[phreakout13]

My G4 Powerbook is acting very funny. Everything is very slow or not working at all. When I went into activity monitor, in the li'l CPU monitor window, everything is blue. There's a little legend thing that says blue means % nice (I don't know what that means) and next to that it says 98%. The only process that's using anything is called "MDCPd" and that's using about 96%. I've never seen this before, and I have no idea what's wrong. Can anyone help? Thanks

 

[igucl]

I guess it's being "nice."

 

[mkrishnan]

Nice is a Unix term. It basically means a program is running that wants a lot of processor time, but is willing to step aside for high-priority work. On a multi-user computer, if you wanted to run a time-intensive simulation, you'd run it "nice" in the background, so that the user at the screen wasn't impaired. In a single user setting, I think some system tasks like the cron maintenance tasks are niced. That's in theory, at least, since obviously in your case it is not being ncie to you.

I don't know what MDCPd is, exactly. MDCP appears to stand for "Media Device Control Protocol" and the "d" means its a daemon. So it is related to some kind of media device, I guess. Do you have anything plugged in?

Otherwise, try this:

- Shut down all applications and wait a minute, then see if performance improves

- Reboot

 

[mkrishnan]

Oh, on a single user Mac, Nice % should typically be close to zero.

 

[phreakout13]

I'm the only user on my computer. I forced the MDCPd process to quit, and % nice is at zero. I hope forcing it to quit didn't hurt anyhting, but now everything seems perfectly fine. Thanks for the replies