Help with my powerbook and SLOW OSX

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agentphish

Guest
So i put my powerbook to sleep last night. Woke up this morning, put it in my bag and came here to class. Was trying to get onto our schools airport network and it wouldnt go, so i just rebooted. Upon reboot osx loaded only my dock. nothing else. not even the top taskbar, no clock/battery/airport. I just had a spinning beachball of doom. I clicked on the system prefs icon on the dock and was able to open it.

So i decided must be a glictch so I rebooted.
Same thing happened. Finally about 10 mins later my icons and the top task bar came up and i was able to get online.

Anyone have any ideas? time for a format? What should I try?
 
Joined
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Location
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Your Mac's Specs
17" Flat Panel iMac -15" 1.5GHz, 80GB HDD, 128MB ATI video card, 1GB RAM- PowerBook
This happened to me the other day, my Powerbook would take like 10-15 minutes to just boot up and then I'd get the neverending beachball. I booted into console mode and did fsck -y and it seemed to work but yesterday it did the same thing but this time it wouldn't verify or repair the disk. I called tech support and he went through about an hour of different test and stuff and then finally had me do a "Reformat and Install" of OSX but it still didn't fix the problem. I had to drop off my Powerbook to the Applestore last night for service and should have it back by Monday (hoping).

Tech support had 2 other support people on the phone as we did this testing and no one could determine what could be causing it. All the hardware tests passed with no problems so they recommended I take it in so they can find the problem.

At least I still have my iMac at home or I'd probably be lost.
 
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V

vtupser

Guest
I have had the same problem sometimes. How much space is left on your hard drive? Usually with the more stuff on your hard drive the longer the time it takes for your computer find all it needs to start up. I have also found that if I have all of my fonts enabled (have a ton of the them for graphic design work) it will take a longer time to start up. You can try disabling the ones that you dont need and just use the base system fonts if you have an excess amount.
 
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A

agentphish

Guest
I too am a graphic design student. But i do not currently have any extra fonts installed/enabled. So thats not it. I have plenty of free space on the drive. only 20/80 gigs are used. basically i use this comp for school an dnothing else. no music/video (yet), just my design work with quark/illustrator/photoshop. only about 2 gigs of mp3/acc on here.

Should i zap pram, repair permissions? What else
 
Joined
Jun 24, 2004
Messages
476
Reaction score
7
Points
18
Location
Arlington Heights, IL USA
Your Mac's Specs
17" Flat Panel iMac -15" 1.5GHz, 80GB HDD, 128MB ATI video card, 1GB RAM- PowerBook
You could try booting with the Install disc (OSX) and run Disk Utility from there to verify the disk to see if that is the problem. If that doesn't detect anything and you are still having problems then you could do an "Archive and Install", other than that I would call tech support so at least your problem is logged in case you start having bigger problems.
 
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flonejek

Guest
If you can get hold of the a techtool pro bootable cd it'll scan all your hardware or any errors and stuff, it pretty much covers all bases and if it can't find/fix the problem then yor best bet is to send it inf or repair. (btw I am biased towards techtool pro because I had a firewire drive that was bung and it made my iBook take ages to boot, but I managed to get most of my data of it with TT pro and discover that the drive had about 10% bad sectors...)
 

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