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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Really Slow

bwyatt - Mar 24, 2008 - 9:01 am

I have a pretty annoying problem with my Mac. Since we had a power cut, which I think has caused this, my Mac has been running really slow. The hard drive can be heard reading/writing constantly even when I'm not doing anything, it takes forever to start up, when I type the letters appear 1/2 a second to a second to actually appear which makes it hard to type effectively. Basically, everything is slow. I've tried the following, to no avail:

Simple restart
Permission check/repair
Disk check/repair
Removed all startup items

I'm running Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard) on a 24" iMac (the generation before the new black ones) 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB RAM.

Thank you for any support.

bwyatt - Mar 24, 2008 - 9:51 am

Also, watching videos is slow too. The sound is fine, but the video lags horribly.

Serenak - Mar 24, 2008 - 8:48 pm

Hello Brad

Thanks for using us at macosx.com and I will try to advise or assist you as best I can.

OK so you think the power cut is the cause - that is at least a start and also a good probable cause.

If the drive is doing a lot of read/write take a look at the Spotlight - if it is corrupt then you will have the Mac endlessly trying to fix it - consider deleting it and then reindexing (You could look in Activity Monitor and see if spotlight is high up there in the activity list)

Open System Preferences and click the Spotlight button. Select the Privacy tab and add your hard drive to the list of drives to exclude from Spotlight searches. Wait about five minutes and then remove your hard drive from the list. Spotlight will then reindex your drive.

Hopefully this will cure it

Come back and let me know and if not we can look at more esoteric options

bwyatt - Mar 25, 2008 - 9:56 am

Thank you for your response, Serenak.

I did what you asked and although Spotlight is faster and works normally now, the rest of the computer is still slow. It's stopped reading/writing for no reason now, however.

I look forward to your replies.

Serenak - Mar 25, 2008 - 6:01 pm

OK Brad

Well the Spotlight endless indexing is fixed at least...

How much space is left on the Hard Disk? If it is less than 10Gb you could be running into trouble - consider a bit of archiving and tidying removing some old stuff to CD/DVD etc.

Have you got OnyX (or Cocktail or any of the tools that run the Maintenance routines)? If not get OnyX free here (versions for 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5 available) http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html and use it to clear out the caches, run maintenance etc.

You could download and reinstall the 10.5.2 combo update to see if that helps.

Other than that I am pretty much out of ideas other than to do an Archive and Install preserving Users and Settings...

Let me know if you have any joy and I will try to think of anything else you can do.

bwyatt - Mar 28, 2008 - 12:49 pm

I've just turned my Mac on and it's working fine now!

Thank you for all your help, Serenak. An excellent service you have here.