Email video file attachment failed and now the OS is totally bogged down, how do I fix it?

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I tried to attach a .wmv video file to an email and I believe the file was too large. Now my OS is running super slow. Apple support final recommendation was to wipe everything off of the computer and reload the OS. I was hoping there would be a better way.
 
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Welcome to the forum.

Can you launch Activity Monitor and see what is going on? If you can get AM running, look at the CPU stats and click on the header of the column "% CPU" until the big hitters are at the top. It may be that Mail is still working on getting the file attached, which could be bogging things down.

Also, right click on Macintosh HD then Get Info and look at how much space is left on the drive. If it's getting full, that can slow down your Mac.

You haven't given us information about your Mac, so next time, let us know what Mac (from About this Mac), how much memory, how big the drive is and how full it is, plus the version of macOS you are running.

And what have you tried? Have you rebooted and it's still running slow?
 
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Raz0rEdge

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Whoa, that's totally useless advice from Apple. How about just a restart as Bob suggested to see if things are back to normal, as they likely would be.

This is akin to nuking your entire lawn to deal with a single weed. Yes, I could dig it all up, put down new soil and loam........or, I could just pull out that one weed and call it a day. :)
 
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When I get AM running it shows mail and a few others bouncing up and down but none look like a significant % of total. My machine is running Mojave v. 10.14.6, it has 8 gb of memory and 1 T of storage with 858 gb available. I spoke with Apple support and they walked me through several reboot type of fixes without success. Sorry for the poor term usage I'm kind of a newbie on fixing this stuff. Thanks for your help and attention.
 
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With AM running, what does the Disk tab show? Are there a lot of reads/writes going on? That can also slow down the machine.
 
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With AM running the Disk tab shows a list of read/writes going on with the most significant being a Kernal_Task with 23.89 GB written and 453 MB read, user is Root
 
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It's not the totals, but the graph at the bottom:
2019-09-19 05.55.29 pm.png
 
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I can see it but it doesn't seem to show any significant activity, mostly flat with small spikes. What should I be looking for? BTW the Kernal_Task is the only one showing "0" under Process ID.
 
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I tried to attach a .wmv video file to an email and I believe the file was too large. Now my OS is running super slow.


Try quitting the email application you used and leave it off for a while and see if things improve at all.

+! As to what Ashwin said about what Apple advised, that's just crazy advice for your problem at hand.

PS, BTW: What Mac model and OS version are you using as I didn't think there was much support if any for .wmv files with recent Macs and their OSs these days.

Or is there something on your Mac that's trying to convert it or something???


- Patrick
======
 

Rod


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God, when did Apple start adopting the "Nuke and Pave" solution for relatively simple problems.
Patrick might be on the money with a conversion program. I know converting .wmv files on my MBP with Smart Converter Pro uses up about 80% of my CPU but I don't try to do anything else while its running I just let it do its job, usually during dinner or o/night.
I suppose you have tried shutting down and restarting? You can also Force Quit apps from the Apple Menu especially if they have stopped responding.
You can also force quit processes from the Activity Monitor by double clicking on the process and selecting quit. You cant cause a problem doing this because if its required it will just start up again but the Kernel task seems a bit odd to me.

Addit; I just noticed you said Apple had talked you through a few reboot methods so I assume you have shut down and switched back on at least once.
 

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When I get AM running it shows mail and a few others bouncing up and down but none look like a significant % of total. My machine is running Mojave v. 10.14.6, it has 8 gb of memory and 1 T of storage with 858 gb available. I spoke with Apple support and they walked me through several reboot type of fixes without success. Sorry for the poor term usage I'm kind of a newbie on fixing this stuff. Thanks for your help and attention.

What were those? Did you power down the machine completely and restart it and the slowness persisted? These sorts of things don't carry over between power cycles. If I were doing something and the machine became unresponsive or something, I could hold down the power button to do a hard shutdown and then restart and it should be back to normal behavior immediately, assuming it behaved normally to begin with.
 
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God, when did Apple start adopting the "Nuke and Pave" solution for relatively simple problems.


+1. Unfortunately their similar "solution" has been posted several times here and elsewhere recently and I dare say it may be the new Apple OS fixit method. Shudder... :Smirk: ;P



- Patrick
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All, I tried the suggestions listed in Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance by Randy B. Singer. When I performed #10 "Rebuild Mail's Database and Backup Your Email" it appears to have cleared up my problem. Thanks for your help...Frank
 
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All, I tried the suggestions listed in Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance by Randy B. Singer. When I performed #10 "Rebuild Mail's Database and Backup Your Email" it appears to have cleared up my problem. Thanks for your help...Frank


Thanks for the post Frank.

It's always nice to hear back of a successful fix and the methods used.


- Patrick
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Rod


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Great stuff.


Sent from my iPhone using Mac-Forums
 

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