Crack smoking 17" powerbook?

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blackoutspy

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Within the past week, my powerbook has gotten DRAMTICLY slower. For the simplest of tasks, Quicktime, for instance, it will sit there, with under 20% cpu usage displaying the OS X wait icon( spinny circle) After 5 min. of inactivity i decided to force quit, and sure enouh the application's name is red, so i do a force quit. Takes about another 2 mins for that to actualy happen. As soon as it does something like this, it will basicaly not run anything with out a good restart. I'm begininng to call the color full OS X wait circle, the dreaded circle of death. Anyone know what could be causing these problems?
 
How much ram do you have? I know, even less ram couldn't make an app take so much time to load. But you should really check which resources of your system are limiting the performance.
 
FYI, it's semi-officially called the Spinning Beach Ball of Death.

In Terminal, run top and see what tasks you have running, and how much CPU and RAM they are taking. There could be something sucking down your performance in the background.

If there's nothing out of the ordinary, try running some basic maintenance. Install and run MacJanitor to clean up your system. Use Disk Utility to repair your permissions and check your hard drive. Check the "Mac better than PC?" thread for my instructions on how to enable window buffering.

And max out your RAM to the maximum your checkbook allows. It always helps.
 
This is a new power book, so it has 512mb of ram, and its been my fault but i havn't looked to see the load on my system at the times of these. But its not so much when an application is load, as when its been running for a few mins. What seems to happen is it will load up just fine, preform its task a few times, but then, something happens that makes the death circle appear. And half the time the harddrive spools like its about to do something intense, but it just spools back down and continues to taunt me with the death circle. I'll look at TOP next time its happening to see if anything is out to kill me. I'll update you when i get the info.
 
Try these simple fixes to see if you fix it.

1. Buy Alsoft's Disk Warrior - IMHO this is simply the best utility for the Macintosh.

2. Boot into single user mode (command+s at startup) and run fsck -y until it replies that the disk is ok. Then type reboot to boot normal.

3. Use Apples Disk Utility and Repair Permissions (Applications->Utilities-Disk Utility). Mac OS X is BSD based so it is a good idea to Repair Permissions after every major software install.


Good Luck.
 
Hmm, the disk spooling like that sounds like it's hitting the HD for virtual memory. How many apps are you running at once?
 
TruBluEnv is the main process that Classic uses (notice how large a memory block it needs) Quit Classic, TruBluEnv goes away.
 
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