OSX is Unstable

supanatral · #1 March 27th, 2007, 11:04 PM

My mac freezes almost as much as my pc would. does anyone have any suggestions on how to get it to run a bit better?

nixgeek · #2 March 27th, 2007, 11:40 PM

Repair your disk and disk permissions with Disk Utility.

NEVER use Norton Utilities on OS X!! It will cause more harm than good.

Download Onyx and run the maintenance options from it.

Try not to let your hard drive's free spac fall below 10% of the drive's capacity.

Add more RAM, minimum 512 MB for Tiger.

Since you're running an Intel Mac, make sure the applications you're running are Intel native or Uniersal Binaries, otherwise they will be running under Rosetta, a PowerPC compatibility layer that translates the PowerPC code of the app to something the Intel CPU can understand (speed is akin to a Power Mac G3 according to some reports here).

doemel · #3 March 28th, 2007, 03:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by supanatral

My mac freezes almost as much as my pc would. does anyone have any suggestions on how to get it to run a bit better?

I'm not sure if repairing permissions is going to help. It is generally overrated, it won't hurt though. Bad memory is a frequent cause of system instability. If you have multiple memory modules installed remove them and test the system with on at a time or excluding one module at at time. If you only have one module installed do yourself a favour and get another one, why not get a 1GB module while you're at it.

If this doesn't help, do a complete reinstall from scratch.

In my experience, I have yet to come across an OS X system that is unstable without some faulty hardware being the cause. I have seen and fixed a couple of more or less common h/w failures like HDDs with too meny bad blocks/sectors, fault memory, I have even fixed a G4 Powerbook that had random sleep problems by pulling out a faulty temp sensor (Apple still hasn't recogized this as an issue that should be addressed with extended warranty repairs).

Anyhow, good luck with your trouble shooting!

supanatral · #4 March 28th, 2007, 08:56 AM

I ran Onyx and it said that I need to repair my disk and told me how. I havn't got around to it just yet but I'm planning on doing it tonight. Now, what is meant by repairing the disk? is there a problem with the physical hard drive or does it mean that it's found a few errors in OSX that is needed to be repaired.

If I did choose to reinstall OSX, is it possible to backup my programs in my Applications folder so that I don't need to redownload them and for some of them, activate them?

Also, I don't know whether repairing my permissions or not is going to fix it but I need to do that anyways.

doemel · #5 March 28th, 2007, 09:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by supanatral

I ran Onyx and it said that I need to repair my disk and told me how. I havn't got around to it just yet but I'm planning on doing it tonight. Now, what is meant by repairing the disk? is there a problem with the physical hard drive or does it mean that it's found a few errors in OSX that is needed to be repaired.

I don't know what this means in Onyx's case since I'm not familiar with it. It could "only" be corrupted or otherwise (filesystem) files or a physical problem. Do check the drive with other utilities as well and make sure to run the deepest diagnostics available.

Quote:

Originally Posted by supanatral

Also, I havn't figured out why it is that when I try to install something it tells me that I don't have permissions and I need to authenicate even though I'm the computer administrator...

This is normal OS X behaviour. It's a way to avoid well known security issues that plague the Windows world. It doesn't matter that you're logged in as Admin. Many installers make this kind of futile though since by requiring admin privs even though they wouldn't actually need them for just copying a couple of files around. Call it bad or lazy programming or whatever you want.

supanatral · #6 March 30th, 2007, 01:16 PM

I tried that and it doesn't seem to fix it. I'm looking at resinstalling osx, is there a way to backup my programs so that i can put them back on later?

Satcomer · #7 March 30th, 2007, 02:41 PM

Archive and install. This will put you old applications & data in a special folder. You then can moved what you need from that special folder to the new system. Then delete the remaining of the special folder that you don't need.

supanatral · #8 March 31st, 2007, 02:17 PM

OK, Anyways I started looking at all the programs I have that cost money and I only noticed one that I might have to repurchase but I'm not to sure at that. Also the program was only worth $15 so I decided to format completly and install. I'm starting to love Mac OSX all over again. *sigh* it works so much better now!