What's wrong with my MBP???

[SurferMan]

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This morning out of nowhere it's barely working, when it loads up if I click on anything from the airport icon to applications etc it takes forever to load and gives the spinning beachball sometimes for over a minute before doing whatever action I clicked. I was online when it just froze and that icon popped up saying X page froze would you like to kill it, but I couldn't click, so it wouldn't do anything. Shut it down holding the power button, turning back on now I have these issues????

 

[S.B.G]

Well it's possible your HDD is failing. Have you dropped it or had any trauma to it? If not, the HDD can still fail. How old is it? Do you have a current Time Machine backup?

 

[HLdan]

Ditto, sounds like a failing HDD or it may just have a lot of errors on it. You could pop in the install DVD, go to the install screen, choose Disk Utility from the menu bar then choose Repair Disk. If there are any errors it will show them. If that still doesn't help then your HDD is most likely failing.

 

[0007776]

I agree with everyone else saying it's a dying HD, if you don't have a backup, make one before doing anything else.

 

[SurferMan]

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It's only a year, dropped once but that was like 7 months ago and wasn't a hard drop. Never used time machine, used to PCs and this thing took me forever to fig out, I had to run a vm for business etc as so many programs I use won't work or don't work as well on a Mac. How could the hdd just fail like this? Talk about crappy apple quality, how do I make a backup as it's acting all weird right now? damnit I have so much stuff on here for biz

 

[HLdan]

It's not uncommon for an HDD to fail in less than a year. I bought a brand new 24" iMac (back in the day) and while the Mac was perfect the HDD failed on me in 8 months and Apple replaced it. Hard drives of today certainly aren't as well built as long before. They are much cheaper now with huge storage so corners are liable to be cut.

 

[SurferMan]

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Ok now this makes so sense, now it's working fine, stuff opens, no slow down etc?I just did two updates so don't know if that fixed anything but I had a icon in the background that said updates are ready. edit-maybe not, I opened up chrome again and spinning beachball is back now when the tabs reopen.

 

[S.B.G]

It doesn't take much for a HDD failure. If my memory serves me correctly, the head is literally 1/millionth of an inch above the platter and a human hair caught in between them would crash a HDD. So even the slightest bump/drop can cause a head crash and create bad sectors. There is technology today built into most HDD's that will stop the HDD when it senses motion to protect itself. But a drop of your computer 7 months ago could have been the culprit. You probably have a bad sector that wasn't being utilized back then and now it was written to and is hard for the HDD to read which is why you're having problems now.

Regardless of all that, it's not Apple's fault for the quality of the drive. All HDD's are subject to these issues. It's a mechanical device prone to failure.

You really should get an external HDD and run Time Machine to preserve your applications, files and preferences so that you don't lose them when you have a HDD failure. You may still have time to do this before your HDD fails completely.

One thing you can do is take the HDD out and connect it to an IBM PC and run SpinRite on it. It is a great HDD recovery and repair utility and has saved many HDD's for me over the years to where I could get data off of them for people. If you do this, you will still need to replace the HDD as this one sounds like it is damaged.

 

[SurferMan]

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I have an external hdd but have no idea how time machine works or what to do. I'm used to pc's, not Macs. And of course this happens just as the warrenty expired. And I have hundreds of bookmarks in Chrome that I need...so pissed right now

 

[S.B.G]

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Ok now this makes so sense, now it's working fine, stuff opens, no slow down etc?I just did two updates so don't know if that fixed anything but I had a icon in the background that said updates are ready. edit-maybe not, I opened up chrome again and spinning beachball is back now when the tabs reopen.

The Software Updates are highly unlikely to have been causing your problems.

 

[S.B.G]

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I have an external hdd but have no idea how time machine works or what to do. I'm used to pc's, not Macs. And of course this happens just as the warrenty expired. And I have hundreds of bookmarks in Chrome that I need...so pissed right now

Time Machine is really easy to use. Just connect your external HDD and open Time Machine, then point it to the External HDD and you're all done. TM will do the rest. The initial backup will take a little while, but afterwards it does incremental backups and only takes a few minutes at a time. It's a "set it and forget it" approach.

 

[SurferMan]

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Going to try backing up and then reinstall osx maybe. How do I save my bookmarks from chrome?

 

[deeddawg]

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Going to try backing up and then reinstall osx maybe. How do I save my bookmarks from chrome?

Click on the Wrench icon, select Bookmark Manager, then on the next screen select Export Bookmarks from the drop down.

You can also set up Chrome to sync your bookmarks with your Google account via the Options panel again under the Wrench icon.

They should also be incorporated in the system backups via Timemachine, definitely get that going ASAP since you're at serious risk if you don't have backups of your stuff. Hard drives ALWAYS fail, the only question is when.

 

[SurferMan]

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Yeh just tried and that doesn't work in chrome, there's no export option anywhere? Searched online and people were saying the same thing, apparently you can't export chrome bm on. Mac...gotta be kidding me??? I did get the files I needed into my external hdd, but can't fig out the bookmark issue with chrome. Ok apparently it's under organize, don't know why they did that

 

[Aaron from KY]

Nevermind, just saw your edit.Why not just drag your bookmarks folder to the external harddrive and then drag it back when you've reinstalled everything.

 

[HLdan]

In terms of the bookmarks if all else fails you cans sign up for the 60 day free trial of Mobileme. It will backup all your bookmarks. When you get a new HDD installed it will restore them all back in place. But honestly if you can set up Time Machine with your external drive that would better suit you as it will back up everything for easy restore later.

 

[SurferMan]

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Ok it's been fine now, once I moved stuff over, now there isn't any slow down, it loads quickly like normal (before it took longer)... I think it may have been a glitch but I'm pry gonna still reinstall fresh osx. I've seen similar stuff happen on pc's and a fresh install or restore fixed it. I don't think it's a hdd failure. In chrome I had two pages open with tons of tabs...I've noticed Macs dont like this as I've had freezing in safari from doing so, never happened on my pc when I've had 4-5 pages open with dozens of tabs. So we'll see what happens, it seemed to be fine before unroll I reopened chrome then hell broke loose lol, as safari would rub fine... Untill chrome was restored

 

[Blu101]

In terms of the bookmarks if all else fails you cans sign up for the 60 day free trial of Mobileme. It will backup all your bookmarks. When you get a new HDD installed it will restore them all back in place. But honestly if you can set up Time Machine with your external drive that would better suit you as it will back up everything for easy restore later.

Or you can take a little time and copy/paste each bookmark's address into a word doc/iWorks/notepad file and save that. Restore by clicking on each link and book mark them all again. A bit tedious, but use as a last resort.

 

[Blu101]

Ok it's been fine now, once I moved stuff over, now there isn't any slow down, it loads quickly like normal (before it took longer)... I think it may have been a glitch but I'm pry gonna still reinstall fresh osx. I've seen similar stuff happen on pc's and a fresh install or restore fixed it. I don't think it's a hdd failure. In chrome I had two pages open with tons of tabs...I've noticed Macs dont like this as I've had freezing in safari from doing so, never happened on my pc when I've had 4-5 pages open with dozens of tabs. So we'll see what happens, it seemed to be fine before unroll I reopened chrome then hell broke loose lol, as safari would rub fine... Untill chrome was restored

Backup just in case.

Have you checked your RAM usage?

Do you shut down every day/night? If so, leave your MBP in sleep mode over a few days' time. I've read somewhere on here that there are maintenance scripts that run during sleep to clean things up. Mine was taking 38sec to go to sleep (light blinking) when shutting down every night - left it in sleep mode for a few days and now it's back to ~8sec. Worth a shot..

Keep in mind that if you have a gazilion web pages open at the same time it will slow down your machine...

 

[SurferMan]

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Damn sorry on the typos, on the iPhone lol. Yeh I normally don't shut down and leave it in sleep mode as I'll usually have a browser open with tabs. Yeh Macs don't seem to like or have the power to handle bunch of tabs open.. My pc's/laptops could have five pages open with at least a dozen tabs each and no slowdown, one page doing that seems to push the Macs limit for whatever reason.

 

[Blu101]

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Damn sorry on the typos, on the iPhone lol. Yeh I normally don't shut down and leave it in sleep mode as I'll usually have a browser open with tabs. Yeh Macs don't seem to like or have the power to handle bunch of tabs open.. My pc's/laptops could have five pages open with at least a dozen tabs each and no slowdown, one page doing that seems to push the Macs limit for whatever reason.

Damn, you really are the surferman! lol I go nuts (overwhelmed) if I have more than 10 tabs open.

Well, try using another browser until google updates Chrome. Right now Chrome is a bit resource hungry, which doesn't help, especially if a few of those open web sites use flash Safari, even though it's not the best, seems to be the least resource hog in my experience, as well as the least battery draining when on the road. It's the native browser, which tends to be efficient, just like Explorer on Windows. Give it a shot - you can customize the toolbar and you may be able to import your bookmarks from Chrome, check the settings/options for both browsers. I like Chrome too and that's how I started, but I now use Safari almost exclusively, even though Chrome is a bit faster - Safari is just much more efficient on my MBP.

 

[sydenham]

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Damn sorry on the typos, on the iPhone lol. Yeh I normally don't shut down and leave it in sleep mode as I'll usually have a browser open with tabs. Yeh Macs don't seem to like or have the power to handle bunch of tabs open.. My pc's/laptops could have five pages open with at least a dozen tabs each and no slowdown, one page doing that seems to push the Macs limit for whatever reason.

Sounds like your doing something wrong if you can't have lots of tabs loaded. Good to see it wasn't the "crappy Apple quality" that was causing the problem, but user error. You have used the machine till the warrantee ran out and still don't know how to back up??? Yea just blame Apple.

 

[SurferMan]

Damn, you really are the surferman! lol I go nuts (overwhelmed) if I have more than 10 tabs open.

Well, try using another browser until google updates Chrome. Right now Chrome is a bit resource hungry, which doesn't help, especially if a few of those open web sites use flash Safari, even though it's not the best, seems to be the least resource hog in my experience, as well as the least battery draining when on the road. It's the native browser, which tends to be efficient, just like Explorer on Windows. Give it a shot - you can customize the toolbar and you may be able to import your bookmarks from Chrome, check the settings/options for both browsers. I like Chrome too and that's how I started, but I now use Safari almost exclusively, even though Chrome is a bit faster - Safari is just much more efficient on my MBP.

Its mainly sometimes for business and few things I'm doing I can have so many things going at once, especially when researching some stuff. Computer seems to be running fine now. But I'm still going to do a fresh install tonight or tomorrow.

Sounds like your doing something wrong if you can't have lots of tabs loaded. Good to see it wasn't the "crappy Apple quality" that was causing the problem, but user error. You have used the machine till the warrantee ran out and still don't know how to back up??? Yea just blame Apple.

I've had other, countless issues with this computer before that were fixed. Honestly never bothered with Time Machine as I kept forgetting about it. Had to spend over a 100 bucks on a good wireless N router b/c this MBP would barely work on the G's that I had that worked flawlessly on pc's. And was just away and used friends phone as a wireless hotspot in the mountains, friends that brought pc's worked perfect on the signal, the two macs (inc mine) we're insanely slow on the same hotspot. I remember my friends iMac having an hdd failure too after about 4 months of owning it, but didn't think of it till now as the issues i had were not what happened to him nor what I remember seeing on a normal pc that had hdd failure.

You can't do something "wrong" with tabs, hell, you open them up and thats it.. nothing to screw up. I've noticed the MBP slowdown before when tabs are open in say two different pages....my pc's could handle a ton more with no issues. But this was the 1st time I had what happened to my MBP today.

I have two external drives I use and though I can move files from the Mac, it won't work with them to backup, says incompatible and I need to reformat them...sorry, not going to lose all that stuff I have on them or bother rebacking those up and doing everything all over again.

 

[sydenham]

Its mainly sometimes for business and few things I'm doing I can have so many things going at once, especially when researching some stuff. Computer seems to be running fine now. But I'm still going to do a fresh install tonight or tomorrow.
I've had other, countless issues with this computer before that were fixed. Honestly never bothered with Time Machine as I kept forgetting about it. Had to spend over a 100 bucks on a good wireless N router b/c this MBP would barely work on the G's that I had that worked flawlessly on pc's. And was just away and used friends phone as a wireless hotspot in the mountains, friends that brought pc's worked perfect on the signal, the two macs (inc mine) we're insanely slow on the same hotspot. I remember my friends iMac having an hdd failure too after about 4 months of owning it, but didn't think of it till now as the issues i had were not what happened to him nor what I remember seeing on a normal pc that had hdd failure.

You can't do something "wrong" with tabs, hell, you open them up and thats it.. nothing to screw up. I've noticed the MBP slowdown before when tabs are open in say two different pages....my pc's could handle a ton more with no issues. But this was the 1st time I had what happened to my MBP today.

I have two external drives I use and though I can move files from the Mac, it won't work with them to backup, says incompatible and I need to reformat them...sorry, not going to lose all that stuff I have on them or bother rebacking those up and doing everything all over again.

If you format the drives using Fat 32 you can use them for Windows and OSX. However if its too much trouble and you can't be "bothered" doing this so you can backup your laptop, then I guess no one can help you. Good luck.