Mac OS 9.2 slooooww

james1043 · #1 September 10th, 2005, 11:38 PM

Hey all!!

New to the forum here. Had a problem with the computer starting really slow, it basically was taking an hour to startup! When I would finally get logged in programs would take a long time to open also. From reading a few forums I saw someone else had a similar problem and they found it to be an Extentions Conflict. I went to the extentions folder and set them back to base extentions and restarted. It started very quickly although my printer was Xed out. Went back to extentions turned it back on and also turned on Stickies and Norton Anti Virus. When restarting again it was back to the slow startup, not an hour but very slow and opening programs was back to being slow also. Turned off Stickies and Anti Virus in the extentions restarted and all seems to be normal. Is there anything else I need to do or look for? how does something like this happen? The computer was running normally before this and halfway through the day I noticed it was running slow, was basically frozen and when restarting with the reset button this problem began. any advice or suggestions would be welcome!

Thanks!! James

nixgeek · #2 September 11th, 2005, 12:01 AM

Have you run DIsk First Aid? It's in Applications-->Utilities. Have it repair the disk right out. Hopefullty thatr should fix things. Also try rebuilding the desktop. Right before the extensions finish loading on bootup, hold down Apple-Option. You'll get a message about repairing the desktop. Say yes. It's good practice to do this maybe once every month or so.

It also sounds as though you might have an extension or control panel conflict. Was there anything you installed prior to the slowdowns? Try rebooting with the default extensions/controls panel subset and then turning the 3rd party ones on one by one, rebooting after you turn each one on to pinpoint what's causing the slowdowns.

As much as I still do enjoy Classic, this was one of the things I dreaded doing. Thankfully this isn't the case so much in OS X.

sinclair_tm · #3 September 17th, 2005, 12:46 PM

first mistake was to push the reset button. that is only for when the mac freezes up and you can't get to shut down. it is always best to use 'restart' or 'shut down' from the 'special' menu. by using the reset button things were not properly closed before the computer restarted and may of gotten corruped, which effect startup. also disk first aid ran before the computer would get to the extentions, and when it finished, it doesn't continue on to the desktop, it just sits there waiting for you to click ok. it may after an hour deside that you arn't there and contiune, but i've never waited to see. also i'm sure that norton was running some tasks that it doen't do normally because of the reset, and that takes time. these are things to think of in the future.

**fryke** · #4 September 25th, 2005, 02:42 AM

Going back to the idea of sorting the extensions: If you start from the basic set and that runs fine, just start the ones you really need. Norton Antivirus is not needed, really, so you might want to keep those turned off. They might very well be the ones in charge for the slowness.

RacerX · #5 September 25th, 2005, 04:27 AM

Yeah, I'd suggest keeping Norton Antivirus off. Mac OS 8/9 viruses are very rare and almost all of them (as I recall, there were about 30 or so) were transmitted by exchanging documents.

If you feel the need to run an antivirus app, I think you could get away with doing it once every couple weeks. Having it on in the background is overkill.

In 15 plus years of using and servicing Macs I've only run across one system with a virus infection. In Mac OS 8/9, viruses are very very rare, and with the number of people still using Mac OS 8/9 in decline, the odds of getting a virus these days is nearly zero.