New Mac Pro - Getting slower and Slower

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The story so far. Ive have my mac pro a week now, 2.66ghz, 2gb RAM, 160+250GB HDD, x1900xt 512mb card.

Once i had set it all up, got my software on there, got all my funky little widgets it was perfect everything was so quick to open etc

One week on, i have noticed a considerable drop in performance, programs taking alot longer to load, time between clicking on a msn pop-up and the box appearing has tripled documents in photoshop take a lot longer to open.

Other problems i have had. Dreamweaver MX 2004 didn't open, it wud pop up and down on the dock and do nothing, when i restarted it opened but 1 in every 2 times i would get a message saying it was had to close - close, re open, report. I uninstalled then re-installed. i had more problems, same things again and it would take around 60 seconds to open. So i decided to get rid of it all together

Photoshop cs1 - same thing here with the error message, uninstalled and re-installed twice and is now working OK, still takes ages to load

Premier 6.5 - would crash whenever trying to export movie, very slow at opening, 50/50 if it would open - uninstalled and binned!

Now ive checked activity monitor and istat pro widget… and there are the results:

I am running:

Itunes
Safari
Thunderbird
Messenger

Istat pro:

CPU:

User 1%
System: 3%
Nice: 0%
Idle: 98%

RAM:

Wired: 191
Active: 772
Inactive: 745
Free: 338

Activity Monitor:

Safari: 143.93 MB Real, 553.54 MB Vitual
Kernal task: 183MB real, 1.22Gb Virutal
Messenger: 76mb Real, 500mb vitual
Itunes: 53mb real, 438mb virtual
Thunderbird: 38mb real, 400mb vitual

Now should i be worried? could there be something on my system? do i need to clean it up after re-installing programs over and over?

Sorry for the long post, im just extremely worried about my mac, a week in with this many problems doesn't feel me with confidence :(
 
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A few notes. Photoshop takes an eternity to load everywhere on every machine. Don't worry about that one.

Before I get too worried, I would get a copy of the OnyX tool, at http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html and clean all your caches, logs, etc. This can make a real difference in performance.

With Activity Monitor, do you see that your average "resting" CPU level is more than about 2-3%? If it is, what are the top two or three processes, and what CPU level are they using?

One other thing to note is that Spotlight may be indexing data on new stuff you install, and that will temporarily slow things down.
 
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joe.morgan
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ah yes sorry forgot about activity monitor data:

CPU:

%User: 7.5%
%System: 6%
%Nice: 0%
%Idel: 86%

RAM:

Wired: 200mb
Active: 646mb
Inactive: 741.15mb
Used: 1.55mb
Free: 460MB
VM Size: 16GB
Pages in/out: 82482/155

Disk activity:

reads in: 64639
writes out: 96632
data read: 2gb
data written: 4.73gb


I was also reading in a mac switchers guide about mainenance scripts that run at 3am every day that help keep your machine running smoothly. As my machine isn;t on then will they not run? Should i leave my machine on or downlaod macjanitor to do the tasks for me?

Thanks
 
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joe.morgan
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Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD 2
 
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joe.morgan
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ok i was hoping things would just sort themselves out but they haven't :(

I only have 2mb of RAM free at the moment running itunes safari and messenger and i also found something called clamscan in the activity monitor using 99% of my CPU? im guessing this is something to do with clamXAV but its not even running?

Also how much should kernal task be using? at the moment mine is using 1.3GB of Virtual and 250MB of Real which seems alot?
 
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Clam scan is a free anti virus program according to my google search.
 
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99% cpu usage may not be as bad as it sounds. Your machine has four processors, so clamscan is essentially hogging one of them for it self. Still there is probably a lot of disk-io occurring and memory being used by it. clamscan may also explain why your kernal_task is taking up 3-4 times more memory than my two systems.

If you didn't install clamscan, then I'd kill it and figure out how to stop it from loading. Also go the the ClamAV web site and see if it scans all files on its initial scan. If you were to shutdown the machine before the initial scan completes, it is possible that it would have start all over. I for one don't see a need to run anti-malware software at this time.

The applications you mentioned are all PPC code. Go to the vendor sites to see if there are any special patches to make them work. If I remember correctly, Adobe had some issues.

Premier 6.5 was discontinued for the Mac. Although I thought I heard they are bringing it back. Anyhow, running video software compiled for PPC processors on Intel will definitely challenge the Rosetta engine.
 
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joe.morgan
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thanks for your help xstep. i think there might be a scheduled scan for sundays by clamxav so thats why it was running. im going to forget premier and look at getting final cut and wait for cs3 from adobe and that will hopefully sort things out.
 
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joe.morgan
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ive just installed and used macjanitor and i now have 1.2gb of RAM free... so im a happy bunny and everything is nice and fast again!

On another note, im dying for a widget that i can input all my favorite TV programs and it will tell me when its next on and on what channel. If anyone knows of such a widget (UK TV) then please let me know

Thanks!
 
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yeah another thing besides mac janitor to use is a widget called Maintidget, http://www.giantmike.com/widgets/Maintidget.html , it is basically macjanitor but in a widget and it shows you the date you last ran them. i use have both mac janitor and that and they both work great. also i hope cs3 will run faster then cs2 cuase cs2 is slow. and i would strongly recommend getting final cut pro instead of premier becuase it runs good and all and in my opinion is much better software.
 
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how does that matter, jw?
In another thread someone mentioned that each icon is actually a window so each takes alot of resource. The fewer you have on the desktop the better window manager (and the Finder) can work. Right now I have about 100 icons on the desktop and things seem fine to me. Yes, I need to do some cleanup. :)
 
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Can anyone comment on how MacJanitor differs from OnyX, which also allows you to run the daily, weekly, monthly etc. scripts?
 
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In another thread someone mentioned that each icon is actually a window so each takes alot of resource. The fewer you have on the desktop the better window manager (and the Finder) can work. Right now I have about 100 icons on the desktop and things seem fine to me. Yes, I need to do some cleanup. :)
ok thanks
 
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In another thread someone mentioned that each icon is actually a window so each takes alot of resource. The fewer you have on the desktop the better window manager (and the Finder) can work. Right now I have about 100 icons on the desktop and things seem fine to me. Yes, I need to do some cleanup. :)

Thats plain and simply not true.
 

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