Hello, about a week ago completely out of the blue my 2009 white macbook started loading tonnes of beach balls, it was only when I used firefox, so I went about doing all the usual stuff, clearing caches etc. to no avail, so after that I went through disk utility repairs, PRAM restarts etc. and for a while this fixed it, but it started up again, even when running safari.
I have a 500gb hard drive and 4gb RAM, and I'm running Lion.
So I thought it could be an issue, like needing to replace my RAM chips, so for the time being I reseated them, and I also installed mackeeper and did a full system clean up, which did the trick for a day or two, but I was on my mac yesterday, and it started to run really really slowly, but kind of manageable. So I went to record some sound into it and for some reason when I switched on the mic connected to the mac it shut it down, completely went black and switched off.
So I tried for an hour or so to get it fixed back up, but when it finally loaded up it was slower than ever, it would take half an hour to load to the desktop, and when you clicked on an app it would never load, and you had to force quit it (which took about half an hour to load itself), after this it took me a good hour to wait for the shut down option to load up and finally work.
After this I left it overnight in the hope that giving it a bit of a rest might clean it up, which seemed to work OK for about 10 minutes this morning.
I've scowered countless forums on 'Spinning beach ball of death' and other faults, but anything that has worked has only been temporary.
I've comfortable ran Firefox, itunes, mpegstreamclip, ffmpeg, various hex editors, and photoshop all at the same time, but all of a sudden I started getting loads of faults.
The PRAM resets worked for a little while, but now it takes hours to get past the apple loading screen, and when it does finally load up it's running as though it has about 100kb of RAM.
I'm currently in the disk utility repair option (CMD+R on startup) and can easily access the internet, and safari runs perfectly smoothly.
I don't want to waste money on new RAM if the chips I have are actually OK, which they seem to be at the moment in disk utility. I got the same errors with Safe Mode, as I do when I try and log in normally.
I can't think of anything else I can do other than copy everything from my hard drive and try and re-install lion. But then I'll lose all my apps, which is really rubbish, plus I have a years worth of degree work, and about two years of art work that hasn't been updated in a good few months.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what may be the problem?
I have a 500gb hard drive and 4gb RAM, and I'm running Lion.
So I thought it could be an issue, like needing to replace my RAM chips, so for the time being I reseated them, and I also installed mackeeper and did a full system clean up, which did the trick for a day or two, but I was on my mac yesterday, and it started to run really really slowly, but kind of manageable. So I went to record some sound into it and for some reason when I switched on the mic connected to the mac it shut it down, completely went black and switched off.
So I tried for an hour or so to get it fixed back up, but when it finally loaded up it was slower than ever, it would take half an hour to load to the desktop, and when you clicked on an app it would never load, and you had to force quit it (which took about half an hour to load itself), after this it took me a good hour to wait for the shut down option to load up and finally work.
After this I left it overnight in the hope that giving it a bit of a rest might clean it up, which seemed to work OK for about 10 minutes this morning.
I've scowered countless forums on 'Spinning beach ball of death' and other faults, but anything that has worked has only been temporary.
I've comfortable ran Firefox, itunes, mpegstreamclip, ffmpeg, various hex editors, and photoshop all at the same time, but all of a sudden I started getting loads of faults.
The PRAM resets worked for a little while, but now it takes hours to get past the apple loading screen, and when it does finally load up it's running as though it has about 100kb of RAM.
I'm currently in the disk utility repair option (CMD+R on startup) and can easily access the internet, and safari runs perfectly smoothly.
I don't want to waste money on new RAM if the chips I have are actually OK, which they seem to be at the moment in disk utility. I got the same errors with Safe Mode, as I do when I try and log in normally.
I can't think of anything else I can do other than copy everything from my hard drive and try and re-install lion. But then I'll lose all my apps, which is really rubbish, plus I have a years worth of degree work, and about two years of art work that hasn't been updated in a good few months.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what may be the problem?
only problem is that I can't get past the load screen. I might leave it overnight and try. All that in the morning, the hard drives not even a year old yet.
