[SarSlus]

I have a G4 812 that is a couple of years old now. It has 1.5 gig of ram and I mostly use my desktop to email, surf, word, excel, and look at adobe files.
I do not really download that much from the net. A couple of days ago my unit has been running dog slow. I fire it up and it runs fine for a while 2-3 hours and then it times out with the color circle all the time. Even opening a small word document can take a minute or two, which normally takes seconds. I thought it would help to download the new OS 10.3.9 only to find out that really didn't do much.
This is the first problem I have had with my unit since I got it. Any suggestions??

[Big Mac]

It sounds like something has gotten corrupted. I would perform an Archive and Install of Panther or Tiger when it is released.

[Chito]

other that the obvious repair of permissions, try setting up a new user account and see if your problem persists while using the new account. Your user prefs may have become corrupt.

[ajprice]

Download Cocktail and go through a system cleanout with it, it will clear your system and internet cache files, and do the maintenence routines on the system. I did this a few days ago and I noticed a speed difference afterwards, although mine was not as slow as what you describe, just a little under par. Also try something like Norton Speed Disk to tidy up the files on your drive, if the diagram of the files looks like a coloured noise filter, your drive needs defragmenting.

[SarSlus]

Big Mac. I also just purchased .mac account the other day. If I sync my home to the .mac, reinstall pather, or get tiger when it comes out, is it possible that when I save the info and files back it will be corrupted again?? Or that does not happen with mac's.
Sorry for asking a dumb question it's just that I'm not used to fixing my Mac, and when you are unfamiliar you ask silly questions.

Ajprice- thanks for your suggestion. Do you know where I could download this cocktail program from, and Norton speed disk?

Thanks for your help and suggestions guys.

[chris v]

Originally Posted by ajprice

Also try something like Norton Speed Disk...

I've got to beg to differ here. Too many people have had Norton's products totally screw their OS X installations. It's unlikely that if this behavior started all of a sudden that it's due to fragmentation, anyway.

Cocktail is a handy program though. Cleaning the caches sounds like a good place to start, here.

Also-- have you recently added any fonts to your system? you could be having grief from corrupt fonts. Just a thought.

[SarSlus]

Chris V, Well sounds like cocktail is the program to start with first. I certainly do not want to mess the unit up more then what has already been happening.
To answer your question, I have not downloaded any new fonts. The only thing that I downloaded was daylight contact manager a 30 day demo version last week. For some reason it did not install correctly so I junked it. It was running fine after I did that, however there might be a symptom from that.

I'm also going to try the other user, and see if the problem still ageists. Test that for a couple days.