Strange 15" PB Behavior

brian greenbrian green
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
The last few days have been a trying time for me with my 15.4" PB. I have the Superdrive model with 1GB of RAM, and an 80GB 5600 RPM HD. A few days ago the Finder became extremely sluggish and would often times not respond at all. Applications would hang, and the laptop took over an hour to boot up. This was not normal behavior so I backed up my files and wiped the hard drive and started from scratch.



After putting everything back on, including the new iLife and updates offered by Apple, I fired it up and it appears to be working fine again. When I go to open up iPhoto (I have just over 1000 photos) it's extremely sluggish and even editing photo's becomes a drawn-out experience. I exported 58 photos to a folder and that in and of itself took quite some time.



I'm at a loss trying to figure out what this could be. Is it a possible RAM issue? I've had this laptop since they first came out. This is the first time I've had any trouble with this laptop and I'm surprised it would act up after all this time. Is it an iLife issue that I'm unaware of? I'd like the add, that at no time in the past months have I been online with my PB.



I know this isn't the best way to diagnose a computer but I'm on temporary duty out of the US and can't just drop by an Apple store for help. Any ideas or help any of you can offer will be much appreciated.



Thanks In Advance,

Brian

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    sonofsylvanussonofsylvanus Posts: 579member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Brian Green

    ...15.4" PB.... an 80GB 5600 RPM HD...



  • Reply 2 of 6
    torifiletorifile Posts: 4,024member
    I'd say it's probably NOT a RAM issue because that would lead to instability and not slow performance (in most cases).



    There are some troubleshooting steps you should take and most of those are outlined in the sticky at the top of this forum. If you haven't already, try clearing out the cache on your computer. The easiest way to do this is to download Cocktail (search macupdate.com for it) and have it do all the regular maintenance scripts as well as clearing out the caches on your computer. HTH.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    brian greenbrian green Posts: 662member
    torifile, I have Cocktail and run the scripts weekly. I've done it again and no change. I emptied out all the caches with Cocktail and no change. I used fsck and it said the drive was ok so that can't be it. I'm really at a loss as to what could be causing my PB to run slower than molasses. When it comes to permissions, I couldn't reset them because Coctail would always hang. I would use Disk Utility and the same thing happens. I would pursue it further but it's a fresh install of the OS with the 10.2 update I downloaded from Apple and transferred to my PB with a memory stick. I haven't altered any permissions.



    It's making me ill watching my $3300 laptop become a paperweight before my eyes and it's giving all the Windows users quite a laugh at my expense as well. I'm out of ideas.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    cosmonutcosmonut Posts: 4,872member
    I personally DO think it's a RAM issue. I know I got bad RAM in my parents' iMac last summer (from Crucial, too! Go figure) and it caused the Mac to do all sorts of weird, unexplainable things.



    Take the added RAM out and see what happens. You might find that things run a little faster and you won't have the quirky problems you have been.
  • Reply 5 of 6
    kraig911kraig911 Posts: 912member
    some ram when it goes bad can corrupt files in memory and then when the drive writes them back to itself it uses corrupt files in essence. Without totally crashing the system. Unless its ECC ram but still take out the ram you added and see if that fixes it. Ram can be wierd.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    brian greenbrian green Posts: 662member
    I think I may have figured it out. Lets see if this makes any sense to any of you. I noticed that the problem with Finder and all the other Apps occured strangely at the same time frame when I first installed the new iLife. I remember iPhoto asking me to let it rearrange the pictures in iPhoto to use the new filing system or something vaguely along those lines. I said sure. That, I believe, is when everything went wrong.



    Is 1000 pictures too many? I deleted 500 of the older ones that I knew I had backed up on CD and just kept the ones I'd taken recently. I tried exporting them to a folder on my Desktop and I got a warning telling me that I didn't have enough disk space to do it. That's absurd when I still have 60GB free. So I went direct into the iPhoto folders and took the pictures out and dropped them into the desktop folder just taking the pictures, no folders.



    When I was done with that, I deleted all the iPhoto pictures folders basically taking it back to a brand new iPhoto. I imported the 500 or so pictures from the folder on my Desktop and now, without any common sense at all, everything seems to be working just as snappy as it was before!



    What would have caused this? Is this an isolated case? I certainly hope so, so that no other Mac users have to face such a hair pulling experience as watching the beach ball for an hour waiting for Finder to advance.



    Furthermore, I wanted to tell everyone that I appreciate their help and I also wanted to describe how I managed to fix the problem on my laptop just incase some other unfortunate soul happens to have the same problem.



    Thanks Again,

    Brian
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