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djmb · Mar 22, 2005, 01:23 PM

I don't know what the deal is with my hard drive, the powerbook is new, got it from apple store in August. but lately the computer has been slowing down. I copied a music file from itunes directory to desktop, it was 155mb (a mix) and it was only copying at 2mb/s. right now i'm importing the music file into Audacity, a music editor, and it's taking forever. using IPulse, it tells me that writing at 1mb/s and it's peak was 3mb/s, is there something wrong with my hard drive?

I have SMARTreporter running and it's green. i also ran a battery of tests with Onyx, MacJanitor and MacSweeper. i don't k now what else to do.. maybe format the hard drive?

my computer hasn't been slowing down that much recently, but the hard drive is still slow. i just copy and pasted a 225mb file and its taking over 3 minutes, checking IPulse disk activitiy, says that i'm writing at 2mb/s with a peak of 3mb/s

doesn't this seem awfully slow? my hard drive is 5400rpm btw

This has been happening for a couple of months, whenever I do a search in Finder, it completely locks up my computer, i can't use any programs, and i can hear the hard drive whirring in intervals. ijust did it and took a screenshot of Activity monitor. it took a while to take the screenshot since everything was locked up, but it really doesn't show much

http://www.mikeberlyand.com/hang.jpg

I've tried running various repairs and optimizations.. i tried deleting files so i have atleast 10gigs freespace, i have 1.25GB RAM, what else could possibly be wrong with my computer?

i think i figured out why my computer froze before when i was running an update for Peak4, it's a VISE installer, and so the first thing it does is searches my hard drive for the program to update. now this is the same thing that happens when i search for files with finder. it completely locks up my computer. so i think the problem is when my hard drive searches for files, and also the fact that it writes slow.

I booted up from the Apple CD and ran the extended hardware test, took about a half hour, and found no problems. I guess the only thing I can do is get an external hard drive, and put all my stuff there, if that doesn't fix it.. I guess i'll have to go to the apple store.
Any suggestions?

djmb · Mar 22, 2005, 06:42 PM

I ran a series of tests on my hard drive with DriveTest. the results were fine, and showed that my hard drive is good. so i don't know what the problem is..

here are the results

http://www.mikeberlyand.com/tests.zip

there are 4 images in the zip file, bar graphs. my computer is the red bar

the graph compares my computer to other computers

f1000 · Mar 27, 2005, 05:11 AM

You might want to nuke and reinstall the OS. I keep at least two accounts on my computer: an Administrator Account and a User Account. I only install software into the Administrator Account. I don't run any programs from it. I do all my work in the User Account. If I somehow mess up a setting in the User Account, I can always delete the entire account and create a new one from the Administrator Account. Saves me the trouble of reinstalling.