Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Scotttheking · Dec 17, 2003, 01:22 PM

Back when 10.2 came out, I did a clean install.
I'm on 10.2.8 now.
Over time, the machine has gotten slower. Now itunes skips, fire takes seconds to send or receive a message, omniweb keeps crashing, terminal lags when I type stuff in, textedit takes a long time to load, mail is sluggish, etc.
I'm on a powerbook. When I hit the volume or brightness keys, the machine pauses for up to a few seconds.
Pretty much, the whole system is damn slow.
Why is this happening? It feels worse then win98 in terms of degradation over time.
Is this normal? Other then reformatting, is there anything I can do about it? If I do have to reformat, where can I get the x11 beta 3 from?

--Scott

JKT · Dec 17, 2003, 01:56 PM

Firstly, how much disk space do you have left?

How much RAM do you have?

What kind of routine maintenance do you perform?

- Have you downloaded and run MacJanitor to run your cron jobs?

- Have you repaired permissions recently?

- Have you cleared your caches recently?

typoon · Dec 17, 2003, 01:57 PM

Fire up good ole Diskwarrior and TechTool Pro 4.

dagaz · Dec 17, 2003, 02:02 PM

This is definitely not normal. I assume you've repaired permissions and ran fsck, but have you re-installed the 10.2.8 combo installer?

Scarpa · Dec 17, 2003, 02:08 PM

Have you tried poking around console.log and system monitor, etc to look for systemic problems?

That's definitely not right, I would guess you don't have enough RAM and you're paging to disk too much. Laptops have slow disks to this will cause a significant performance hit.

FWIW on my G4-800 Powerbook I generally just reboot when things slow down and it's back to normal. I typically have to reboot about once a month, and 90% of the time the reason is network related as I use it both at home and at work.

Orion27 · Dec 17, 2003, 02:13 PM

Why are you still in 10.2.8? Probably the worst revision in Mac history. No degragation here in the land of 10.3.1. Fragmented drive may be a possiblity. Keep 10.2.8 and do a slow migration to another volume. You can run DiskWarrior and Drive 10 from 10.2.8. Manipulate your new Panther drive. TechTool is your only defrag choice in Panther. Good Luck. Disk maintenance is key.

typoon · Dec 17, 2003, 03:35 PM

Originally posted by Orion27:
Why are you still in 10.2.8? Probably the worst revision in Mac history. No degragation here in the land of 10.3.1. Fragmented drive may be a possiblity. Keep 10.2.8 and do a slow migration to another volume. You can run DiskWarrior and Drive 10 from 10.2.8. Manipulate your new Panther drive. TechTool is your only defrag choice in Panther. Good Luck. Disk maintenance is key.

Not true about TechTool being the only choice. You can also use Drive 10 as well. Also Norton does it but we all know about Norton for Mac.

Orion27 · Dec 17, 2003, 03:54 PM

You are correct sir! Slooooooooooow!

RayX · Dec 17, 2003, 05:36 PM

Originally posted by Scotttheking:
I'm on a powerbook. When I hit the volume or brightness keys, the machine pauses for up to a few seconds.
Pretty much, the whole system is damn slow.

This may be a bug in recent builds of OS X. It is still a problem in 10.3.1. I haven't worked out exactly how to trigger it yet, but I believe when you come out of sleep and you start rapidly increasing and decreasing the brightness, (eg. if you went all way down and then all the way up, etc.) the system will become unresponsive. There will be a few second delay between mouse clicks, and when you increase or decrease the brightness, there will be few second delay between the changes. Logging off and on again fixes it. Happened a few times on a PB 17"...

Would be interested to know if anyone else out there can reproduce this, try it out.

Orion27 · Dec 17, 2003, 09:10 PM

I have to tell you I'm on a Al 15" PowerBook and I'm thrilled with it. I'm the only Mac on Win
2000 LAN. I have a high speed internet connection over the network and connnect seemlessly to the server and half a dozen other clients. The **** I've been throwing at this book for past week would have driven most OS's and hardware to its knees. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, digital cameras, HP Laserjets with gimp drivers, iTunes, Acqlite, Now up to Date, OfficeX, Excell spreadsheets, PDF files, cross platform emails w/attachments, Entourage, Mail , Toast 6, Safari, Mozilla, Netscape, IE, Windows Media 9 so I can listen to Rush on KFI, Quicktime, an older Canon 650U scanner and an S750 injet.
Not one ****ing hiccup. Oops I lied. Went to burn a disk yesterday and it wouldn't mount a blank DVD though it would mount one with data. Found the offending .plist and smote that sucker. Gee do you think I need to derfragment my hard drive? To my Al 15"
I love ya man!

pcd2k · Dec 18, 2003, 04:36 AM

Well Scotttheking
I recently experienced problems in 10.2.8 as well and I recently found an easy and valuable solution to our problems get and run Mac Sweeper 2.0. (freeware) After I installed it I wemt to the area that allows you to run everything which I did in the backgound whilst browsing and amazingly although it said that it would take awhile it worked and ran quite fast; you must authenticate before you run anything and when it finshes it asks you to authenticate again, It repaired all my strange foibles with the mouse and windows etc but I still I notice that my mouse behaves somewhat eratically over some heavily designed web sites, but since these are far and few between I don't worry about it too much. After running Mac Sweeper I noticed that my drives got back 2 and 5 meg of space and my corrupted version of Preview works fine again.

Scotttheking · Dec 27, 2003, 09:07 PM

Heh, I didn't mean for this to be post and run.

I've done some more poking, and it looks like much of the stability is related to sleep.
I think that once my workload gets down to a manageable level I'll give apple a call. Of course, that'll be in a month. In the meantime, I have to reboot at around 7 days of running.
I'm probably going give it a clean format next weekend.
This is driving me nuts. I was working on a college application, and it was a PDF form, which cannot be saved with acrobat reader. So I figure I'll fill it out, it'll take me a week. Today reader plain crashed on me when I told it to print the application.
*Sigh*

barbarian · Dec 27, 2003, 11:34 PM

3 questions:

1. Do you have lots of screensavers installed?

I tracked down instability on one of the machines here to a 3rd party screensaver with a memory leak. It was causing freezes and crashes after waking from sleep.

2. Are all your drivers for 3rd party usb devices up to date?

Another machine was becoming crashy after waking from sleep because the drivers for our wacom tablet were problematic.

3. Do you use 3rd party haxies?

These also should be kept up to date... on some machines they have been found to cause random weirdness.

NYCFarmboy · Dec 28, 2003, 04:52 AM

Your os x system may be running sluggish because you have files on your desktop instead of the home folder/user folder where they are designed to go.

My sister-in-law's G4 677 mhz powerbook got very slow over time, so she had me look at it.. I discovered she was downloading her digital photographs into a single file on her desktop to keep track of them easily. (She had about 6,000 high res digital photos stored in one file on her desktop).

After I moved that folder to her home folder the computer gurgled for a while, then after it seemed to settle down it ran like new. Very fast and good as new in fact.

I don't know if that would help your problem, but for her it worked perfectly to speed her os x back to its spritely self.