[Billy]

In an attempt to squeeze the last out of my aging Core Duo iMac, I decided to "quit" unnecessary processes using Activity Monitor. I thought that if I tried to quit important processes, OSX wouldn't let me do it. I thought that I had done this a few times before. Well, no such luck. After a few hours, things started to go south and eventually I had numerous errors. I tried using Disk Utility to repair the disk but no luck. The disk was being accessed continuously and I feared it would die.

Thank goodness for Carbon Copy Cloner. Finally, I did a backup of the messed up disk and it came through with flying colours. Even though a couple of files were not backed up, I did recover the majority. I only had a problem with my bookmarks file in Safari. My mail was rebuilt and everything was there. Thank Goodness.

Bill

[Penguirl]

Yes, thank goodness indeed for CCC, and Mike Bombich.

Do you happen to know what you quit that caused the problem? Whenever I've done that I've found process' that warned me I would be logged out if I quit them, but never had an OS fail as a result.

[Billy]

It might have been mdimport, but I am uncertain that I can actually quit that process.

Now, that I think back, there was a process that had the user "nobody". I thought that if "nobody" was the user, there would be no harm in deleting it.

After the backup and restart, my computer has fewer of these processes and it seems to be snappier.