Slow Laptop, so i think i should....

blackoutspy · #1 May 1st, 2004, 07:49 PM

My laptop has been running slow recently after 3 days of up time, so that could be the issue, but i was under the impression that mac's didn't need to reboot. Anywho, I've done a little research and found that most of you say to run cocktail (or onyx i guess) and defragment. I have and run cocktail quite often and am always pleased when i do. Now im trying to defrag using diskwarrior, but i've found a problem. Diskwarrior cannot perform on the drive where OS X residers, or where DiskWarrior itself resides. Therein lies the problem, i only have one partition/drive. So how am i suposed to do this? Any help would be much appreciated i've read through the manual and its still kind of vague.

H2OSX · #2 May 1st, 2004, 08:37 PM

I've heard that you use disk warrior from the CD and not to run it from your hard drive. I dunno if that will help but thats what I've heard. Also you might wanna check their site - might be some help there.

Satcomer · #3 May 1st, 2004, 09:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blackoutspy

My laptop has been running slow recently after 3 days of up time, so that could be the issue, but i was under the impression that mac's didn't need to reboot. Anywho, I've done a little research and found that most of you say to run cocktail (or onyx i guess) and defragment. I have and run cocktail quite often and am always pleased when i do. Now im trying to defrag using diskwarrior, but i've found a problem. Diskwarrior cannot perform on the drive where OS X residers, or where DiskWarrior itself resides. Therein lies the problem, i only have one partition/drive. So how am i suposed to do this? Any help would be much appreciated i've read through the manual and its still kind of vague.

DiskWarrior will only check a non-startup Volume. So put the DiskWarrior CD in, Restart while holding down the option key and choose the DiskWarrior CD (or just hold down the C button during the reboot).

However, I need to ask some questions, do you sleep the Mac at night? If so, download MacJanitor. The program runs the Unix cron jobs (that rotate log files) that are set to run in the long hours of the night. Plus, go to Applications->Utilties->Disk Utility and highlight your OS X drive then Repair Permissions. OS X is BSD Unix based and Unix loves it permissions. Software developers all think their software is of the highest order and will mess with your drive's permissions. This should done after most every big software install (including Apple updates) and about once every two weeks. This will save a lot of future headaches.

I hope this helps you. Good luck.

ex2bot · #4 May 1st, 2004, 10:08 PM

If he's running Cocktail, the log files are already getting rotated.

Blackoutspy: How and when is your laptop running slowly? What kind of laptop? Operating system version? Amount of memory installed? Free space on your hard drive? What programs are you running?

You can also use Activity Monitor in Applications>Utilities to see what programs are running and how much CPU time they're using.

Doug

blackoutspy · #5 May 1st, 2004, 11:34 PM

oh im sorry, i faild to mention my set-up, as pointed out by dktrickey. I am running a 17" G4 laptop, 1ghz, 512mb ram and OS X v10.2.8. It seems to run slower when it has been on for a while. Weather or not i sleep my system depends on if im downloading something over night. If i am, i just turn the screen off, otherwise i close it. I never shut it down.

ex2bot · #6 May 2nd, 2004, 05:37 PM

OS X does _not_ need to be rebooted periodically like previous Mac OSs and Win 3.x/95/98/ME. That common troubleshooting practice of rebooting the machine generally doesn't apply to your Mac.

Among other problems, less sophisticated operating systems did not have protected memory (even 95/98/ME did not have fully protected mem) and the longer the computer was running, the more likely there would be memory corruption.

My longest uptime on my iBook and iMac was about a month. I noticed no slowdown. Generally speaking, I shut down only for thunderstorms and reboot only for system updates.

Did you check Activity Monitor? You can click on the "CPU" column title to sort running programs by processor usage.

And again, what kind of programs are you running when you notice the slowdown? If it's games, that's a whole other can of worms.

Doug

michaelsanford · #7 May 3rd, 2004, 12:28 AM

Have a look, with a CPU monitor (like 'top' in the Terminal) at scitzophrenic processes like:
• Safari
• Microsoft Office (Word in particular)
• iTunes
and sometimes even the Finder

I've noticed, especially with Safari that after a certain amount of time it starts using lots and lots of CPU time without really doing anything at all! Usually quitting that/those app/s solves that problem.

What about logging in and out? If that helps then you probably have some kind of runaway process issue (since logging out quits all your apps and flushes the cache, I believe).

blackoutspy · #8 May 3rd, 2004, 05:44 PM

since repairing permissions, and repairing my disk with DiskWarrior, i havn't experianced the slow down i did early last week. I have also noticed a signifigante amount of CPU power going to AOL instant messanger, when i notice this i quite the app, and my cpu usages drops to a normal idle percentage of around 8%. Maybe AOL is that run away app.