Hi there, On and off, our main iMac has been working extremely slowly. It will take an eternity to start up into Mac OS X, then after logon it MAY or may not work fine. However, most of the time on logon, and nearly all of the time after a good working half hour of light use (Internet, Mail, Finder, etc.), the computer will start operating at a CRAWL. By this I mean constant beachball spinning, no response in either your active program, or the dock, or the menus. The apple menu does not open when clicked. There are only two things to do when this situation arises - wait until the computer responds again, which can be anywhere from 4 minutes to many hours (not kidding!) or force power off the computer. Then you have to wait and wait and wait for the long startup time, and hope that you can finish what you need to do before something acts up again and the system is frozen. The system has become so unusable, I have set up a ten year old Windows XP computer for use, and it works much faster and properly compared to the iMac. So obviously something is wrong here.
I can trigger a less extreme version of this by opening the Spotlight icon on the menu bar, after clicking the icon, the computer will beachball, all open apps and the dock will not respond, but this only lasts about 2 or 3 minutes, after which you can search or exit out, and it continues working. Many times I have thoughtlessly entered a search, thinking it would be faster than manually browsing for it on the disk, then in dismay see my system freeze up. The system is an iMac Core 2 Duo Penryn (April 2008), with 3 GB of RAM installed, a 320 GB Apple hard disk that came with the system, and OS X 10.5.8 with all the latest updates. I have used disk utility on a OS X DVD to do a full check of the disk system for errors, and it came back clean. I ran AppleJack with all of the repairs, but that didn't make a difference. I do think the problem is storage related, because I ran the startup in verbose mode, and I kept seeing messages about I/ O delay errors flashing by on the screen. However, I don't know how to properly troubleshoot this or narrow it down. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks all, Dan -- You received this message because you are a member of the iMac Group, a group for those using Apple iMacs and eMacs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to imaclist@googlegroups.com To leave this group, send email to imaclist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist
