02-28-2011, 02:37 AM

I have recently been getting this more and more often. it seems to happen when itunes is running and playing music through my airport the most, though it is not the only time it does it. I reinstalled osx and did a disk permissions check and it originally had an error, but while doing the the disk check when finished it said repaired. so i was hopeful that it was fixed. though, now it does not do it as much as it did before, i still get it more often than i would like. the back left (if facing the screen)of my computer gets really hot when it tends to freeze, and the only way to fix it is to shut it down and let it cool. i asked a friend, a local computer guy, he said it sounded like the ram is on its way out. can anyone help me with this. i would like to see if i can fix it because getting the computer to the store is a bit of a pain. I am running the most up to date software as well as 4 gigs of ram.

02-28-2011, 04:32 AM

Run all of the routine maintenance suggested here:

OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting

and let us know if that helps.

How big is your hard drive and how full is it? it is around 80% full?

How much RAM do you have installed? Do you have any third-party (i.e. non-Apple) RAM installed?

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________

03-08-2011, 10:54 PM

I have tried most of the things on the list. It is still getting very hot at the back top left corner. It seems to freeze when it is hot. Turning off the computer and waiting awhile to let it cool down seems to be ok,but shortly after using it, not running anything too demanding: skype and firefox it heats up. I have 320 gig hard drive with 40 gigs free and 4 gigs of ram 2 and 2 according to Mac info both are the same. It seems to dislike iTunes the most, sometimes not even wanting to open it.

03-09-2011, 03:20 AM

Originally Posted by riegeronimo

I have 320 gig hard drive with 40 gigs free...

You probably won't believe me, but your hard drive is effectively full. That 40GB of free space that it has, which I know sounds huge, is spread out as tiny little areas in-between thousands of files on your drive, which means that space is too difficult for your Mac's OS to access to do all of the stuff that it needs to do. (e.g. virtual memory, scratch space, system databases, etc.)

What you need to do is get a new external hard drive, offload a bunch of stuff from your internal drive to the external drive, and then defragment the internal hard drive, so that it once again can perform normally.

This is discussed in detail at:

OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
Item #6 and Note #1

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________

03-09-2011, 10:14 AM

i will off load 20 or so gigs and see if that helps. I have a time machine with some space on it. i will get back to you. thank you.

03-09-2011, 10:39 AM

Originally Posted by riegeronimo

i will off load 20 or so gigs and see if that helps. I have a time machine with some space on it. i will get back to you. thank you.

I should tell you that that might help, and it might not. You see, when you offload 20GB of data, you still might not free up a large chunk of contiguous space. It's worth trying, though. The more data you can offload the better.

You could also backup and restore the data on your hard drive, which would defragment the drive and solve all of your problems.

You can free up an extra 1GB of free space by using:

Monolingual (free)
Monolingual

...to get rid of any languages that you don't speak. DO NOT use Monolingual for anything else. (Some users have run into problems using Monolingual to delete PowerPC code.)

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________

03-09-2011, 12:13 PM

...to get rid of any languages that you don't speak. DO NOT use Monolingual for anything else. (Some users have run into problems using Monolingual to delete PowerPC code.)

You should also note that Monolingual is not compatible with MS Office for the Mac. If you're using MS Office, do not use Monolingual as it will prevent MS Office from updating and will have to reinstalled.

03-09-2011, 10:53 PM

So I tried to transfer a folder with 37 gigs. 1st time it got to 210mb and froze. Then I shut down and tried again. This time it got to 6 gigs and froze. And a 3rd time it froze but I couldn't see how far because the screen wouldn't show me the status of the transfer. All the time the only other thing running was firefox. It seems to be getting worse.

03-10-2011, 12:19 AM

I wouldn't transfer 36GB using the Finder in any case. That's more of a job for a backup program.

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________

03-10-2011, 08:59 AM

So I should transfer smaller chunks at a time? 10 gig chunks? I'll try that.

03-12-2011, 12:04 AM

So have been trying to transfer files over in smaller chunks. This most recent was about 7 gigs and the transfer time said 1 hour. Correct me if I am way off here but that seems like a very long time. Plus i got the spinning ball with 1 tab in firefox open and skype then while opening mail to check my email it did it again. I have an iBook g4 that has had under 1 gig of free space and would still function much better than this. I should hope a 2 year old computer with 40 gigs of free space should be able to function better than this. So I guess I have to bring it in to the shop unless someone else has any other ideas. Thank you for all your help.

03-12-2011, 01:05 AM

Originally Posted by riegeronimo

. I should hope a 2 year old computer with 40 gigs of free space should be able to function better than this. So I guess I have to bring it in to the shop unless someone else has any other ideas. Thank you for all your help.

I guess that you didn't believe me when I told you that your hard drive is more or less full because it no longer had any large chunks of free contiguous space for your system to work with. (You could instantly prove it to yourself by running the free demo version of iDefrag, which will graphically show where everything is on your hard drive.)

Please let us know what the shop suggests. I'd be willing to bet heavily that in the end they will recommend that you purchase a new hard drive. (Though they may give you a different explanation for why you need one than the one that I gave you. The techs there may not really understand what is going on themselves.)

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________

03-15-2011, 04:29 AM

I now have 47 free gigs of space and did a defag of my hard drive and Ito is almost too hot to touch. Doing nothing that requires a lot of computing power it still gives me the spinning ball. I'm going to try and do some Photoshop with it after it cools, then if it still has issues it's to the shop. I'll keep you up to date. Thanks again for the advice.

03-15-2011, 10:09 AM

Update: it froze then shut it down. Restarted and now get a "O" with a line through it. I've googled it and came up with some answers that were not too current. Any ideas?

03-15-2011, 06:38 PM

Originally Posted by riegeronimo

Update: it froze then shut it down. Restarted and now get a "O" with a line through it. I've googled it and came up with some answers that were not too current. Any ideas?

The circle with a slash through it is an error code that means that your Mac "could not load boot.efi".

Apple says to "precisely follow" their instructions when this occurs, which can be found at:

Mac OS X: "Broken folder" icon, prohibitory sign, or kernel panic when computer starts