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Sloooooow Mac
#30861 08/20/14 04:15 PM
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For the past couple of days my Macbook Pro has been running very slowly. Not just the internet but also my apps. I tried Disk Utility to repair the disk and permissions. I used Onyx a day early (I use if once a week) and it couldn't even finish what it started. It got hung up. I restarted. I completely shut it down every night. This morning, still slow. Turning off Extensions doesn't make a difference. Also, I'm getting that stupid twirling beach ball goody a lot.

I know some people recommend Disk Warrier (Jon), but I can't use it because of this on their site: The current DiskWarrior DVD cannot start up the new MacBook Pros introduced June 11, 2012. An updated disc that will also start up these recent Mac models will be released as soon as Apple, Inc. releases new startup files to Alsoft, Inc. and other developers.

I don't know if Disk Warrior works for these problems anyway. I'm on the verge of calling Applecare. Sometimes they help a lot and sometimes not so much, so I thought I'd start here.

Any ideas other than what I've done? In layman's terms please? smile

Rita


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Re: Sloooooow Mac
plantsower #30862 08/20/14 04:25 PM
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A bad hard drive is a distinct possibility. Even though SMART is fallible, you can use Disk Utility to get a result. Better still, run a surface scan with TechTool Pro, TechTool Deluxe or Drive Genius, if you have one of them. If Applecare is still in force, by all means use it.


Jon

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Re: Sloooooow Mac
jchuzi #30864 08/20/14 04:52 PM
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Thanks, Jon. I don't have any of the aforementioned utilities though Tech Tool was included free with my other Macs. frown I guess I will call AppleCare. Maybe I will get lucky and get a new hard drive or new Mac if they can't help me.

BTW, if my Mac could run Disk Warrior, would it deal with the slowness? When i read about it, it mainly talks about retrieving data.

Rita


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Re: Sloooooow Mac
plantsower #30865 08/20/14 05:17 PM
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Hi, Rita,

1. The TechTool Deluxe disc you got (whenever) with some purchase of AppleCare may still work with your current Mac; insert the disc, drag the app to your desktop, and double-click to see if it launches, and if it does, run its entire suite of tests. (It'll take a couple of hours.)

2. Although there is no DiscWarrior disc that boots your Mac, if you've got an old disc/version that's compatible with your version of OS X it will run from a bootable volume other than your main boot volume. (You can buy a current disc and run DW from another volume and lose almost nothing, because the disc takes so long to boot that pretty much nobody uses it, anyhow.)

Artie

Edit: DW may be able to deal with your Mac's slowness; it does considerably more than recover lost data.

Last edited by artie505; 08/20/14 05:23 PM.

The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Sloooooow Mac
plantsower #30866 08/20/14 05:18 PM
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If a damaged directory is the cause, Disk Warrior might be able to help but if the hard drive is physically failing, no utility can resurrect it.


Jon

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Re: Sloooooow Mac
jchuzi #30867 08/20/14 05:24 PM
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OK. I guess I can test that by booting from my external drive.

Thanks, Jon.


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Re: Sloooooow Mac
artie505 #30868 08/20/14 05:27 PM
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Hi Artie:

I may have tossed my TechTool (I didn't have Deluxe) when I got my new mac. Also, I never felt it did any good.


I'm not sure I understand your second point, but I guess I could boot up from my external drive and see if I have the same problems.

Rita


Originally Posted By: artie505
Hi, Rita,

1. The TechTool Deluxe disc you got (whenever) with some purchase of AppleCare may still work with your current Mac; insert the disc, drag the app to your desktop, and double-click to see if it launches, and if it does, run its entire suite of tests. (It'll take a couple of hours.)

2. Although there is no DiscWarrior disc that boots your Mac, if you've got an old disc/version that's compatible with your version of OS X it will run from a bootable volume other than your main boot volume. (You can buy a current disc and run DW from another volume and lose almost nothing, because the disc takes so long to boot that pretty much nobody uses it, anyhow.)

Artie

Edit: DW may be able to deal with your Mac's slowness; it does considerably more than recover lost data.


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Re: Sloooooow Mac
plantsower #30869 08/20/14 05:48 PM
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Hi, Rita,

You must have had TT Deluxe if you got it free, although it actually came free with AppleCare, not any computer. (It's a useful utility, if for no other reason than that it runs surface scans, but if you want to run a scan and haven't got a disc I can walk you through running one via Terminal.)

A bootable DiskWarrior disc is totally unnecessary; practically nobody boots from them, because it takes so long. The best way to run DW is to install it on a bootable partition or external drive and run it from there...no need to boot from it.

Hope this clarifies.

Artie


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Sloooooow Mac
artie505 #30871 08/20/14 07:23 PM
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Thanks, Artie. I was about to take you up on walking me through Terminal, but I ran Onyx again and now everything is hunky-dory. If it happens again in the near future, I will take you up on that.

Who knows what crazy things happen and then clear up?

Rita


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Re: Sloooooow Mac
plantsower #30874 08/20/14 11:14 PM
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Because inquiring minds want to know, which of Onyx's many tasks did you run? Simply saying that you "ran Onyx" doesn't give us much information.


Jon

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Re: Sloooooow Mac
jchuzi #30877 08/21/14 02:10 AM
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Oh, okay. I verified the disk, then ran maintenance, cleaning and automation. Mostly I just have it clean up temporary files, caches, etc. I can't tell you each and every thing it does because there are a lot of check boxes and I don't use all of them. Running it a second time really seemed to do the trick, though.

Originally Posted By: jchuzi
Because inquiring minds want to know, which of Onyx's many tasks did you run? Simply saying that you "ran Onyx" doesn't give us much information.


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Re: Sloooooow Mac
plantsower #30881 08/21/14 07:34 AM
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Interesting that you run OnyX every week and your Mac apparently developed symptoms between one run and the next that took two runs to clear up. (Do you restart after running OnyX?) Let's see what happens down the road.

Y'know, your sig just rang a bell in my head, and, since you don't use it, I'm wondering how you're maintaining the battery in your iBook G4?

Edit: You'll find Apple's long-term battery storage advice here.

Last edited by artie505; 08/21/14 07:50 AM. Reason: Add link

The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Sloooooow Mac
artie505 #30887 08/21/14 03:40 PM
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I know. I feel OnyX has let me down some. I don't always restart after I run it, but I did yesterday. Maybe that's why the difference. However, it's slowing up again. frown

I just plug in my iBook and it fires up! But, if I remember correctly, the reason I got a new Mac was because the iBook was doing this very thing and nothing I tried worked. I really don't want to go down that road again. Only this time I still have Applecare so if it's the hard drive, I'll be able to get a new one.

After I get back from errands today, I am going to boot up with my external drive and see if there is any difference. If so, maybe my hard drive is bad, though I would be willing to try your Terminal idea before I do anything else.


Rita


Originally Posted By: artie505
Interesting that you run OnyX every week and your Mac apparently developed symptoms between one run and the next that took two runs to clear up. (Do you restart after running OnyX?) Let's see what happens down the road.

Y'know, your sig just rang a bell in my head, and, since you don't use it, I'm wondering how you're maintaining the battery in your iBook G4?

Edit: You'll find Apple's long-term battery storage advice here.


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Re: Sloooooow Mac
plantsower #30890 08/21/14 05:07 PM
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It might be worth trying to use your Mac without running OnyX for a few weeks. Depending on your settings, running the tasks you mentioned erases large amounts of cached data in a wide variety of areas, which should have the effect of slowing down performance in many of those areas until the caches are repopulated.

If you're deleting the boot caches, starting up your Mac will take longer. If you're deleting the launch services database, opening different types of documents will take longer. Deleting application caches makes launching apps slower. And so on.

Ultimately, those caches are rebuilt, and at that point, performance in a given area should return to normal. But it sounds like you're ready to nuke them all again by about that time!There's no good reason to delete/rebuild most caches—after all, they're there for a reason—unless you're trying to address a specific problem for which such action is recommended.

If your issue persists through restarts and normal use, even if you're not running OnyX, then the problem is likely to be some kind of hardware or software corruption. But as long as you keep running OnyX as the first response to any issue, you're really making it more difficult to figure out what's going on.



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Re: Sloooooow Mac
dkmarsh #30900 08/21/14 10:27 PM
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Hi DK:

What you say makes sense except that it's never slowed my Mac down before by running it every week. Could it be a cumulative effect?

Rita

Originally Posted By: dkmarsh

It might be worth trying to use your Mac without running OnyX for a few weeks. Depending on your settings, running the tasks you mentioned erases large amounts of cached data in a wide variety of areas, which should have the effect of slowing down performance in many of those areas until the caches are repopulated.

If you're deleting the boot caches, starting up your Mac will take longer. If you're deleting the launch services database, opening different types of documents will take longer. Deleting application caches makes launching apps slower. And so on.

Ultimately, those caches are rebuilt, and at that point, performance in a given area should return to normal. But it sounds like you're ready to nuke them all again by about that time!There's no good reason to delete/rebuild most caches—after all, they're there for a reason—unless you're trying to address a specific problem for which such action is recommended.

If your issue persists through restarts and normal use, even if you're not running OnyX, then the problem is likely to be some kind of hardware or software corruption. But as long as you keep running OnyX as the first response to any issue, you're really making it more difficult to figure out what's going on.


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Re: Sloooooow Mac
dkmarsh #30901 08/21/14 11:15 PM
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OK, so I booted up from my external drive. It took some figuring out because I've never done it before, but I know that I got to the external drive because once it loaded up, there was stuff I had already erased from my email and websites I had already removed from my tabs from my HD.

It took awhile to load up which I guess is normal?

It started out a little slow and I got the beach ball, but after awhile, it started running normally. Way better than the actual hard drive.

Does that mean the hard drive has a problem since the external drive seems fine? A problem that means it probably need replacing?

Thanks.

Rita



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Re: Sloooooow Mac
plantsower #30905 08/22/14 04:38 AM
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Next time you experience slowness, regardless of which volume you're booted into, launch /Apps/Utilities/Activity Monitor, select "All Processes" from the drop-down, click on "%CPU", and continue working.

If your slowness is a result of a process hogging system resources, the process should rise to the top of the list and show a high CPU use %.

Last edited by artie505; 08/22/14 08:03 AM. Reason: Clarification

The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Sloooooow Mac
artie505 #30907 08/22/14 03:24 PM
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OK, I'll try that. Maybe I'll get a surprise. But, I've done nothing different. I have tons of memory that I don't use. I'll let you know if that happens.

Thanks, Artie.

Rita

Originally Posted By: artie505
Next time you experience slowness, regardless of which volume you're booted into, launch /Apps/Utilities/Activity Monitor, select "All Processes" from the drop-down, click on "%CPU", and continue working.

If your slowness is a result of a process hogging system resources, the process should rise to the top of the list and show a high CPU use %.


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Re: Sloooooow Mac
plantsower #30916 08/23/14 12:05 AM
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Originally Posted By: plantsower
I have tons of memory that I don't use. I'll let you know if that happens.

Rita, just to clarify what you mean when you day you have "tons of memory you don't use" do you mean unused space on your hard drive or RAM memory?

Last edited by joemikeb; 08/23/14 12:05 AM.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: Sloooooow Mac
joemikeb #30917 08/23/14 12:40 AM
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Mostly memory on my hard drive. I don't check my ram much. Especially since they changed how the Activity Monitor works. It's not as easy to tell. No more pie wedges. frown

Rita


Originally Posted By: joemikeb
Originally Posted By: plantsower
I have tons of memory that I don't use. I'll let you know if that happens.

Rita, just to clarify what you mean when you day you have "tons of memory you don't use" do you mean unused space on your hard drive or RAM memory?


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