CPUs going nuts

Joined
Oct 10, 2007
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Location
McKinney, TX (north of Dallas)
Your Mac's Specs
Mac Pro, 8GB, 3 750GB HDs, 250GB HD, two 22" monitors, 1 iMac, 1 13" Macbook Pro, AppleTv, 2 iPhones
I have had my Mac Pro for about 18 months, a long time former Windows user. It is a fairly powerful machine, 8 GB RAM, 3 750 BG HDDs and 1 250 GB HDD.

I use one large drive as my boot drive, one as my boot drive, one with all of the old files from the Windows days. The 250 BG HDD holds photos and a Bootcamp partition.

I scan many of my documents; bills, receipts, recipes, and store these files as PDFs on the third HDD drive, which is maybe half full. Lately, in the last two or three weeks, I have had some real issues, that I think is related to PDF files.

For a couple of days, Spotlight was apparently trying to index the PDF files, with ATSServer and MDWorker at near 100%. When this happened, the system became unusable. I would be able to switch to other applications, but eventually, everything became unresponsive, although the system would still go into standby. I could wake it up from standby, but I would get the spinning disk and never a password prompt.

So I made my PDF directory private, and that seemed to prevent that specific problem.

However, if I try to open a PDF file, the same thing happens. System goes nuts and becomes unusable. It happened last night as I was trying to look up one of my recipes for a big catering job. The system has been like that for 24 hours (I'm trying to see if it will run its course). This particular file has been around for at least several months; I thought maybe a new PDF file was messing things up, but that does not appear to be the case with this file.

I do have one of the Adobe suites on the system (can't remember which one off the top of my head) and my HP scanner software write directly to PDF.

Does anyone have any ideas or advice?

Thanks in advance

Michael
 
Joined
Aug 20, 2005
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Location
Redlands, CA
Your Mac's Specs
Macbook Pro 15" 2ghz/2GB/250gb/SD - White Macbook 2.16ghz/2.5GB/250GB/SD
Have you made sure that your HP software is upto date? Does it scan to Acrobat to create the PDF?
 
OP
C
Joined
Oct 10, 2007
Messages
23
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Location
McKinney, TX (north of Dallas)
Your Mac's Specs
Mac Pro, 8GB, 3 750GB HDs, 250GB HD, two 22" monitors, 1 iMac, 1 13" Macbook Pro, AppleTv, 2 iPhones
The software is the latest and greatest.

The software creates the PDFs directly; no scanning to Acrobat or any other program. Not sure if that is even related; I only mention it because many of the files in question were scanned (but not all).
 

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