do a verify with disk utility, you may have underlaying problems which may require reformatting the harddisk, corrupted spots on the hd ........trying to open a file which is corrupted can take time........
James

On 05/05/2010, at 18:43, mince and pud wrote:


Thanks Rob and Ray

No, my disc is a little over half full

Did the PRAM (after a couple of unexpected safe boots - you meant command OPTION p r , Ray!!) and apart from the loss of my desktop picture all is working so far. Except the large photoshop file I was working on, and which I carefully saved before the pram restart, has lost its end of file and is apparently irrecoverable. Grrr


On 05/05/2010, at 11:04 AM, Rob Phillips wrote:


One possibility is that your system disk has less than 10% free space.

On 5/05/10 5:26 PM, mince and pud wrote:

wah - would really appreciate help on this one; much work to do!

It's not so much a complete freeze as a gradual grind-to-a-halt. Happened a few times a week or so back and always when my maxtor external drive was doing something so that's now turned off except at backup time and all was well until just now...

I've been having trouble updating a clone with superduper, taking 6 hours and counting to only update 4gb of files. Spotlight was trying to index the disk image so told it not to. SD still slow. Went into spotlight prefs and got a beach ball, tried to force quit (it said not responding) got a box saying it quit while unresponsive. It seems to be gone but its light is still on. An application doing this - not always system prefs - has been common to all the previous occurrences - and doing that terminal thing to find its PID and killing it doesn't work as it's not in the list. Can't try that this time as the finder is also not responding (offers to relaunch but doesn't). Some apps unaffected - mail fine, safari has always been immune. Pressing the power key has done the trick before but I did that 5 mins ago and here I am again.

Help appreciated!

kind regards
alastair


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