Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

zeppo · Nov 19, 2006, 06:14 PM

Recently some programs have been running very slow as if the machine is hanging. Like changing the time i get the spinning rainbow wheel thing for like 30 seconds and sometimes when selecting a folder in quicktime it takes almost a minute. The machine is the stock 2.66Ghz except 1 gig of crucial FB-Dimms for a total of 2gig ram. I bought the crucial ram after they corrected the heatsink problem and the MacPro soon as it came out.Obviously I am new to the mac world so I have no idea whats going on only that it didn't do this kind of stuff until maybe 2 weeks ago.

powerbook867 · Nov 19, 2006, 06:36 PM

If you boot off the disk that came with the machine holding the "d" down, it will send you into the diag portion of the disk. Run a full hardware check just to make sure that everything is good.

Did the problems start after the new ram was added?

Also, you can go into applications/utilities/disk utilities, select your boot drive and do a repair disk permissions..

If everything comes back as OK. you could always remove the added ram and see if the problems go away...

zeppo · Nov 19, 2006, 08:49 PM

The problems started several months after adding the ram. Diagnostics check out fine with or with out the added ram. Disk utilities said some log file permission was wrong so i clicked repair. I guess the next thing to would be to run it a couple days without the crucial ram and see what happens. Is there an equivalent program like memtest that will run on the MacPro I figure I could leave that running overnight to test the machine better.

powerbook867 · Nov 19, 2006, 10:12 PM

I'm not aware of any memory testing programs out there, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone else here does know of one..

What apps are you running when the beach ball shows up? Are a lot of them running under Rosetta? After a reboot, do the problems subside?

Another thing you could do is open a terminal session and issue the top command. That will show you all the apps/services running and you can look at paging as well. Look at free Pyhsmem and the load average. It will paint a picture of over all system performance...

zeppo · Nov 20, 2006, 02:59 PM

Only Firefox 2.0 and maybe thunderbird 1.5.0.8 were running and sometimes nothing except the operating system. Sometimes rebooting solves the problem other times it makes no difference.

powerbook867 · Nov 20, 2006, 06:08 PM

I personally would take out the ram. Run it a couple of days and see what happens.

I have a dumb question (actually 2)... Is it ECC ram and does it have the heat sinks?

Like I said, dumb questions...but I had to ask.

iMacfan · Nov 20, 2006, 06:12 PM

Well, I'd check in Apple system profiler that there are no ECC errors, and also use rember overnight (a good memory checker - it only costs like 2 dollars)

David

powerbook867 · Nov 20, 2006, 09:37 PM

thanks for the mem checker David! Hopefully it will help..

iMacfan · Nov 21, 2006, 06:58 AM

Originally Posted by powerbook867

thanks for the mem checker David! Hopefully it will help..

No problems, but remember that it will not pick up corrected errors- you will still have to check in the memory section of ASP.

David