Did I get a lemon?

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Stouthearted


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Just got a 27 inch i7 iMac and I love it so far; however almost evey time I try to multi-task I get the beach ball and it seizes up my Mac. Sometimes I can't even force quit an application or even restart or shut down my Mac. An example from last night; while trying to convert some video files I simply opened safari and the whole system beach balled. I had to do a hard restart and lost all my progress on the video conversion. This type of situation has happened at least six times in a week. The Mac is a refurb direct from apple. Refurb or not it seems to me that this machine should handle thse types of things with ease. Could I have a lemon on my hands or might I be doing something wrong? I'm new to Mac and OSX so it could be operator error I just don't know.
 
Raz0rEdge

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Depending on the load on the system during the video conversion, it's possible that Safari might be a little slower starting up, but it shouldn't freeze the whole system..

I have a refurned 27" i7 iMac as well and the only time I see the beachball during the normal use of the Mac is when an application is misbehaving or something. I usually have about a dozen or more applications running at the same time doing a whole lot of things with it..

Watching Activity Monitor during all of my actions shows that I'm only ever using about 30% available CPU capacity at any time..

So do this, start up Activity Monitor as the first thing on your Mac, keep it running and then start your video conversion and see how much power that's taking and then load another application to see what happens..

The system shouldn't behave likt this so you should talk to Apple sooner rather than later to get it resolved..

Regards
 
cwa107

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Any time you forcibly power the machine down, you are introducing corruption into the filesystem. And when you do it multiple times, you compound that corruption and the issues tend to snowball.

Before you do anything, I'd open up Disk Utility and run Verify/Repair Disk and Verify/Repair Permissions. Then, shut the machine down, boot in Single User mode and run fsck, as described in step 9, here:

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/93819-basic-os-x-mac-troubleshooting.html

Then, get in the habit of using Force Quit (Command+Option+esc) rather than powering the machine down when there is an issue with an app hanging. This is roughly akin to firing up Task Manager on a Windows machine. And just as in Windows, it's pretty darned rare that you have more than a single app locking up unless there is a hardware issue.

If the problems persist, you'll want to run Apple Hardware Test:

Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test

...and possibly the SMART Utility...

Apple - Downloads - System/Disk Utilities - SMART Utility

To try to determine hardware issues before you call the machine in under warranty.
 
the8thark

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Also there is the hardware check on the system disks that dame with your computer.
"restart the computer with the disc in the drive and hold down the D key I think it is."
Only the disc that came with your computer has this. Any retail OS bought after does not have this.
 
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S

Stouthearted


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cwa107 said:
Any time you forcibly power the machine down, you are introducing corruption into the filesystem. And when you do it multiple times, you compound that corruption and the issues tend to snowball.

Before you do anything, I'd open up Disk Utility and run Verify/Repair Disk and Verify/Repair Permissions. Then, shut the machine down, boot in Single User mode and run fsck, as described in step 9, here:

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/93819-basic-os-x-mac-troubleshooting.html

Then, get in the habit of using Force Quit (Command+Option+esc) rather than powering the machine down when there is an issue with an app hanging. This is roughly akin to firing up Task Manager on a Windows machine. And just as in Windows, it's pretty darned rare that you have more than a single app locking up unless there is a hardware issue.

If the problems persist, you'll want to run Apple Hardware Test:

Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test

...and possibly the SMART Utility...

Apple - Downloads - System/Disk Utilities - SMART Utility

To try to determine hardware issues before you call the machine in under warranty.
Click to expand...
Force Quit did not work in these instances. I could not access the apple menu at all. Restart and quit also did nothing. iMac was completely unresponsive. Is there a way to work around this?
 
Raz0rEdge

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If the iMac is completely frozen to a point where you can't Force Quit the offending application, you might have no choice but to power-down like you've been doing. But to cwa107's post, this should be done very infrequently and if you do it often enough, run the disk repair to fix all the broken files..

Regards
 
dtravis7

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What Application were you using to do your Video Conversion? I have a reason for asking as the older one I use runs under Rosseta and slows down the whole machine. I normally just run it and nothing else till it's finished.
 
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Beach ball

Hi

I had a similar thing happen, but I would get several apps not responding (I think they went red in the activity monitor). I reformatted, reinstalled OSX - twice (you can tell I came from Windows, can't you). Eventually I had a sense of humour failure - my MBP (17" mid 2009 from the refurb store) was practically useless most of the day every day, and had been from day one. I took it to the Genius bar & they found some disk corruption. Fixing this did not fix the problem. They changed the disk and bingo, it's like a new machine. Thanks Apple, and thanks Superduper (for saving EVERYTHING for simple restore).

Jeremy
 
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Stouthearted


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Ran disk repair and all is well again. I didn't realize how CPU intensive the video conversion was. From now on I will be letting it do it's thing without using many other applications. Good learning experience I guess.
 

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