Unidentified Problems in iMac running 10.5.8

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1/25/2010 12:24PM

Hi all, I wonder if anyone has come across this strange behavior before...

My system:
iMac Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.8GHz, 2GB memory
Leopard 10.5.8

The problem started earlier this month, my computer would drop to an excruciatingly slow pace, all applications AND the operating system would be real sluggish. Tabbing through open apps or opening System Prefs would take up to 5min or longer. It usually happened later in the day, and I assumed it was an issue with one of the software I was working in, particularly Flash CS4. This wasnt the case. If I shut down all apps and restarted the system, the problem would still exist, and working on that computer became next to impossible. Sometimes the computer would not startup past the grey screen for 30+ mins, or would display a blue screen for just as long. It would seem to have improved if I turned the computer off and returned the next morning, but working throughout the day it would again hit sometime late afternoon. I had no known scheduled tasks running, I turned spotlight indexing off, I checked for heating issues using iStat, Activity Monitor did not show any clogging of memory or anything out of the ordinary for harddrive activity. Over the course of the past week I tried resetting PRAM, ran a check of the disk permissions, verified the disk, and ran a thorough memory test. Nothing was revealed to be faulty, but the system was still problematic, and seemed to worsen.

Last time I checked on the computer was before the weekend, where something even stranger happened. Surprisingly, I was able to use the computer for a few hours, but the same sluggish state returned. I tried doing the usual, tabbing to a different app, Force Quitting all applications, bringing up Activity Monitor, but the computer was half frozen. The clock was stopped completely, apps wouldnt open, but the mouse was still responding, menu panels opened and the dock still animated on rollover. If I brought up the Dashboard, the screen tinted a bit but no widgets appeared. Opening up the widgets panel at the bottom raised a white bar instead of the widgets tray, and actually raised the entire screen, cropping off the menu bar. Even stranger, on any given menu or dock label many of the letters were jumbled. There were labels that read Shut Doon, Cfmputer, Desktfp, and A ole Pcotos oc CS (Adobe Photoshop CS4). I took a few photos of the screens and decided to give it a rest till after the weekend.

This morning, the computer wouldnt go past the blue screen, with intermittent display of a progress wheel. It wouldn't start in Safe Mode, but did start in Single User Mode. The DVD drive still works, so I am reinstalling the OS at the moment to see if that will kill the problem once and for all. I still have no idea where the source of the problem was, or if it still might exist, but I guess I'll find out soon enough.

Any ideas here?

Thanks for reading,
--Doug
 
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iMac, and Macbook Pro
Sounds like the HD failing to me.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Mac Mini (Late 2014) 2.6GHz Intel Core i5 Memory: 8GB 1600MHz DDR3
Hmmm. I posted a reply to this yesterday. :Confused:

Pretty much the same conclusion as yours ^
 

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