[Joseph]

hi. i have been reading the forums for a while but up until now i have not had a need to post anything. my 15 inch 1.5 g4 with 512 ram powerbook has worked flawlessly since i bought it in september but now i am having a lot of trouble with it. first off, even the most menial tasks such as opening or closing safari, camino or apple mail now are taking very long amounts of time. i am now also hearing TONS of hard disk noise when doing any task. i am also experiencing programs hanging up quite often leaving me with the spinning beach ball and not able to even force quit apps. even the finder has been hanging up on me.

i have verified and repaired permissions, ran all the scripts using both macjanitor and oynx, and ran the apple hardware test disk with no luck of finding/fixing the problem. i've been checking out activity monitor and nothing seems out of the ordinary. i still have 51 gigs open on my hard drive so i do not think it is a space issue.

any ideas of what could be the culprit? would a fresh install of osx help? if so, any tips for doing a fresh install? if all else fails i will take it to apple to get it checked out/fixed but i would like to avoid having to do that and be without it since my computer is absolutely vital for school.

this is my first mac and i've done all the maintainence/troubleshooting that i know of but hopefully some of you experienced mac users can offer some solutions.

any help will be greatly appreciated.

[asodamiac]

im really REALLY new to macs.. but i heard there was some kind of problem with the top ram slot or something.. hahaha wow im not even sure.

[K-Bat]

A few month ago my 15" PB (Toshiba 80 g) developed similar problems you described. My local Apple Store promptly replaced the HD, and the PB has been going strong since then. Try running program called Xbench. If your HD score is unusually low (e.g., lower than 60), I'd suspect that your HD is developing a real problem.

That said, the cause of your HD noise and slow performance could be as simple as an insufficient amount of RAM. You have 512, which I think is not enough on OS X to use your PB for anything mildly serious stuff like Photoshop and iMovie. Memory leaks in programs you run (I think Camino still has memory leak problem) quickly deplete all your physical RAM and forces the PB to start constant memory swapping to HD. You hear a lot of disk activity when this occurs. Check the "page outs" figure in Activity Monitor's system memory; if it's approaching the page ins figure, your PB's "problems" could be cured by adding more RAM. Good luck, and welcome to the forum.

[Big Mac]

I have to agree with the previous poster - you may be lacking RAM. If you're running a lot of large programs at the same time with only 512MBs, you're going to experience thrashing (evidenced by hearing a lot of hard drive activity), and things will slow down especially when you are switching apps. However, if this type of behavior is occurring after a fresh restart and with only a small number of applications open, there must be some other cause.

[Chito]

try creating a new user account and using that one while you do your normal tasks. If your problem goes away you've got corrupted user prefs.

[analogika]

From your description, your hard drive is probably dying.

Download and run SMARTReporter (free) to check on the hardware status of your hard drive.

And BACK UP YOUR DATA.

NOW.
















If you're still reading this, STOP.

BACK UP YOUR DATA.

NOW.

-chris.

[Joseph]

thank you all for your help. i am not a power user and mainly use my powerbook for internet, itunes, email and typing papers. i usually only have two apps running at a time (usually either safari or camino and apple mail) so i do not think those apps would be causing a memory problem. unfortunately it appears as though my hard drive has already died so i am posting this from my neighbor's house. shortly after i posted the thread i was trying to backup my important documents and my powerbook froze up again. when i tried to restart it froze on the white screen with the apple logo.

i read through the "getting started with your powerbook" manual that came with the computer and followed the instructions for when the computer freezes during startup. i used the software/recovery dvd to access disk utility to try to repair the disk. as my luck would have it, it encountered an error and was not able to fix the drive. then i tried to reinstall osx as stated in the manual. as it was preparing the disk to install, it got to 49% and stopped and said there was an error. so after that i had to restart the computer once again. now the computer freezes on startup at the white screen and will no longer access the software/recovery dvd. i can hear the dvd spining in the drive but there is absolutely no hard disk noise on startup and despite my numerous attempts to hold either control or "c" during startup, i can no longer get access to the software/startup/recovery dvd.

since i am not able to boot up the computer, i am not able to download any of the tools mentioned in the thread.

so now i have no choice but to take it down to the apple store. it is still under the initial one year warranty so i am hoping that there will not be any problem getting it fixed, however being without my computer is going to extremely difficult. i was not able to backup my hard drive but i have printed out copies of all the important documents i had saved on the computer so if i was to lose everything on the hard drive it would not be a major issue.

i'll post an update later today after i go to the apple store. thanks again for your help.

[Chito]

That sux. But at least you didn't lose anything critical. Apple should fix it no problem.