Complete slowdown

I've had my MacBook 13" since September of last year, and I've had a few minor performance issues but nothing I couldn't plow past without worrying about. Recently, however, I've suffered EXTREME slowdown and application freezing. It takes upwards of 5 minutes for the machine to turn on, and some applications simply will not start. I can't install any cache-cleaning or system optimisation tools because the dmg mounting program won't start when I open a dmg. When I try to open a movie in QuickTime (movies of size 400MB+ [fraps videos from a game]) it takes a few minutes until the movie actually opens.

I have Windows bootcamped onto the machine too, and that is rapid as anything - absolutely no problems - so I don't think it's a hardware problem.

Any ideas? Feel free to throw any suggestions at me no matter how technical; I'm a technical sort of guy **flexes his geek muscle**.

G'day Druadan & welcome to Mac-Forums.

First thought was to recommend you pop in your instal DVD and boot off it to run Disc Utility - repair permissions and to verify disc .... it's a start!

Pulse-8 said:

G'day Druadan & welcome to Mac-Forums.

First thought was to recommend you pop in your instal DVD and boot off it to run Disc Utility - repair permissions and to verify disc .... it's a start!

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Roger that, will do. Thanks for the welcome. Will try that when I get home later.

If you have a good result, I'd recommend OnyX for cache cleaning etc ...

Pulse-8 said:

If you have a good result, I'd recommend OnyX for cache cleaning etc ...

Click to expand...

Yeah that was one of the dmgs I downloaded but couldn't install 'cause the dmg mounter won't run. Might even have been one of your posts that I got the link from.

Druadan said:

Yeah that was one of the dmgs I downloaded but couldn't install 'cause the dmg mounter won't run. Might even have been one of your posts that I got the link from.

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Have you tried opening the DMG file with Disk Utility? Disk Utility should allow you to check and mount the DMG file.

Here is my standard "recipe" for resolving all the usual issues that may slow down a Mac. You may wish to walk through each of these:

First, check that your processor is running full speed. Go to Preferences, Energy Saver, Options and look at the drop box down near the bottom called Processor Performance. If it is not set to "Highest", set it to that right away. This maximizes performance, but for notebooks, it may run down the battery faster.

Next, download OnyX and run the complete set of clean up and maintenance scripts and then try again. Get OnyX at:

http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

Finally, you may wish to check that you have enough free space on your hard drive. Highlight the Macintosh HD icon on your desktop, CTL-click it and select Get Info from the resulting menu. Make sure you have a reasonable amount of space left. If not, a little spring cleaning may be in order.

There are two excellent apps for showing where all of your hard disk space has gone, Disk Inventory X and WhatSize. Get them at:

Disk Inventory X: http://www.derlien.com

WhatSize: http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize

Both do a great job at letting you zero in on your largest disk space consumers, so that you can hunt down any rogue files.

Do the OnyX thing first, then restart and try out one or both of the above tools. By the way, all three are freeware!

Great post mac57!

Thanks for the posts everyone. i ran the Disk Utility from the installer CD and it detected some bad file permissions. Disk Verification also picked up some disk errors, which couldn't be repaired because there were disk errors =/

Do you think this is a damage hardware error, or a corrupt data error? I.e. will a straight-up disk format solve my problem or am I looking at giving AppleCare a call?

Gee I hope that the permissions issue is a result of the disk errors. I just can't fathom that permissions spontaneously reset themselves.

Druadan said:

Thanks for the posts everyone. i ran the Disk Utility from the installer CD and it detected some bad file permissions. Disk Verification also picked up some disk errors, which couldn't be repaired because there were disk errors =/

Do you think this is a damage hardware error, or a corrupt data error? I.e. will a straight-up disk format solve my problem or am I looking at giving AppleCare a call?

Click to expand...

It is still under warranty so I would give AppleCare a call on this. This is definitely not normal behaviour.

MacHeadCase said:

It is still under warranty so I would give AppleCare a call on this. This is definitely not normal behaviour.

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Agreed. Sounds like bad blocks or a mechanical failure with your HDD.