[phobos]

Hello people!
Ever since I bought my new machine (Mac-Pro 2x2.66, ATI 1900XT, 6GB, 2x250GB HD, Airport card) I've been having some unexplained problems. First of all whatever the settings are on system preferences the system just won't go to sleep. The display saving settings are being used. But the whole system sleeping settings aren't.
There aren't any tasks in the background and there is no network use as well.

The other thing is the constant crashing of the finder. I think this mostly happens when I'm doing some more heavy file work than usual and. Moving files from one place to another, constant renaming, and multiple open finder window are a great crash recipe. The finder comes back on in seconds but this is not normal use. and I didn't have those issues with my older machine at all...

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
If this helps my machine takes an unusual amount of time to boot. 1minute for such a machine is quite strange. All of my other machines take half that amount of time...

[Biest]

Check the hard drives and the ram. I am guessing that either something on the HDDs or the RAM is screwed up, esp. from the "hard drive" tasks slipping

[reader50]

Get in the habit of booting with command-v held down, to show a verbose startup. Watch the text go past, and see where it hangs for awhile. "Waiting for local disks" would indicate a hard drive problem - specifically, a slow spinup. Or a lot of interface errors.

You'll find that you can spot the differences between boot text on a normal machine vs the slow one. Not on the text content, but on which lines aren't supposed to hang for a bit.

[phobos]

well verbose mode doesn't reveal much. It goes quite fast so I can't keep up with the text. But it takes a long while t actually start verbose mode. Meaning that the system is idle for a long time before actually booting up. I guess that leaves us with the system check at the start?? ram, airport card etc??
I'll try to record the verbose mode. That would make an easier study

[reader50]

If the verbose text doesn't hang anywhere, then the exact wording isn't too important here. We're looking for the hangup delay. So your normal Mac goes right to verbose, but the slow one has a long initial delay?

The startup diagnostics could indeed be the cause. It's even possible that it's spending most of the time checking your 6 GB of RAM. Try your Apple Hardware Test, see if it spots anything.

[phobos]

Ok I ran the hardware test in the extended mode which took 34 minutes to complete!!!
It found no problems at all. So I guess the long boot time is expected...
Amazing!

[Biest]

The time span is because of the RAM. Don't rely on the hardware test too much, my PB once failed in me and the hardware test said everything was okay.

[phobos]

Any ideas on the sleep issues?