Mac Pro slow and freezing

UIP · #1 July 3rd, 2008, 09:51 PM

Hi there. I have an Intel Mac Pro which I bought new last year. It has 8GB RAM and four large-ish internal drives. And it's become so slow I can't use it for anything. This has happened to me three times before and out of frustration I replaced the hard drive once and formatted it another time. Both times it came back up to speed, but I can't do that every couple of months.

It's freezing during ridiculously little things, too, like when I open up the system preferences to adjust the input volume. I get the spinning beach ball indefinitely and have to do a forced quit on the system prefs.

I have bought and run: Disk Warrior, Macaroni, Onyx, Mac Maintenance, and Tiger Cache Cleaner. Can you tell I'm desperate?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. No one seems to know what the heck is going wrong. I don't download stuff other than programs connected to my work (Photoshop editing), so I can't see why this would happen.

Thanks.

midijeep · #2 July 4th, 2008, 09:11 AM

First, I would unplug all the hard drives except your main HD.
Secondly, I would take out your RAM and use 1 gig at a time; until you may find one that is causing the problem.

UIP · #3 July 4th, 2008, 11:13 PM

Thanks for your reply. I will try your suggestions. Umm, how obvious will it be if I discover a bad stick of RAM? Oh, and wouldn't a bad RAM stick have been bad all along? Or do they sometimes just fail?

Satcomer · #4 July 5th, 2008, 01:24 AM

RAM can fail. Also did you check the Mac's logs (/Applications/Utilities/Console)? Plus in and Utilities folder is Activity Monitor to see is some process is slowing down your Mac. The Mac Pro should just scream so something is wrong.

Lastly there is some RAM testing software but is line code software but there is a way so regular users can use the RAM testing software. The software is called Rember.

UIP · #5 July 6th, 2008, 10:32 PM

Thanks for replying.

I tested the RAM several different ways, including running Rember, and it came up fine. I also did the diagnostics test, booting from the OS disk. All clear. Weird. I've checked out the console and activities monitor and nothing seems out of place.

So today I cloned the main drive to an external one then upgraded to Leopard, erasing the main drive in the process. So the OS is all shiny and new and I'll see how things go for a couple of days as far as how the computer behaves. It was a pretty drastic measure, but I was losing so much work time with the slow performance that it had to be done. If it still doesn't pick up (and I think it will), I'll replace the main drive. If that doesn't work I'll be back.

Satcomer · #6 July 7th, 2008, 05:39 AM

If this still happens then something is drastically wrong with that Mac! So you might would want to get that Mac serviced with your AppleCare. If you don't have AppleCare then consider taking it to your local Apple Specialist.