do Mac clocks still have separate batteries?

T

tonym911

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This problem is on 'tearing my hair out' but I thought I should put it on a separate thread now as I've just noticed strange things that might help with any diagnosis anyone feels willing to venture.
The basic problem is slow running on the internet. This began suddenly last Saturday. I have done Applejack cleanup, IPv6 switchoff in Sys Prefs, plus quite a few other things in various unsuccessful attempts to resolve it.
The odd thing I noticed an hour or so ago was that the clock in the menu bar was wrong and stuck on the same (wrong) time. The power remaining indicator was also reading an 'old' figure. Trying to access any of the items in the top right menu bar would produce the beachball.
I could move folders etc around on the blue part of the Desktop no worries, and the Finder menu items on the left of the bar were OK. On the Apple menu, only certain functions were working; Sleep, Software Update, Mac OSX, Dock, Location and Recent Items. System Preferences came up OK, but the Network button within that was very slow to respond (about 15 seconds). Apple Menu items that were NOT working (after a few seconds thought by the Apple logo) included About This Mac, Restart, Force Quit, Shut Down, and Log Out.
Have since restarted and these anomalies appear to have gone away, but the slow internet persists. I get Google OK, after about 10 secs, and maybe three or four subsequent pages, but further pages take an age to appear. Force Quit is also very unresponsive. (I've only got 512Mb of RAM in this MacBook, but it was working fine up till Saturday).
As an old-time Mac user I am wondering if there is still a separate battery for the clock, and could this be a clue as to the problem? Here's hoping!!
 
As a followup, I'm noticing that simple web pages without much in the way of functionality come up fast, but 'big' pages like ebay or ViaMichelin (a routefinding site) really make the Mac struggle, far more than it ever did before last Saturday.
 
Have you tried to install a different web browser like firefox to see if its the same? May help determine if its a core system service or if its a Safari issue. Also, try to get the machine to act up while running activity monitor and note what process is hogging the CPU when the hangups occur.
 
Hi djackmac. Thanks for your thoughts. Definitely not a browser-specific thing as it is slow in both Safari and Firefox. In fact Firefox is even slower than Safari. Actually it won't even launch Firefox at all now (just tried it).
Have tried the Activity Monitor again (that was an early fix attempt)! Firing up Safari gives a 101% CPU spike (?!) until Google comes up, at which point Safari is using less than 1% of CPU. Launching ebay from there gives a CPU spike of about 24%, which produces the home ebay page, but then it goes into a continuous 'loading' cycle during which the Activity Monitor is indicating just 0.3% of CPU activity with occasional spikes of 20-30%. Launching other pages (not ebay) produces small instant spikes of between 15% and 30% before they settle down immediately to less than 3%. Outside of the internet, the largest other single user of CPU activity often seems to be something called kernel-task, which swings between 2 and about 10%. That has a virtual memory of 787Mb, if that's of any relevance.
 
Just launched Word from an existing document rather than from the Dock alias, it brought up the document but then hung the Mac completely for a minute before Word crashed again.
 
Relaunching Word, I'm getting a warning dialog saying 'Word encountered file corruption while opening PDFMaker.dot, part of this document may be recoverable, attempt recovery now?'. I have no idea what PDFMaker.dot is, I've certainly never used it, but clicking 'yes' produces my Word doc, albeit with another dialog box reading 'The add-in template is not valid (PDFMaker.dot)'. Wish I knew what was going on, I've been blundering around with this for four days now! :)
 
I notice that the Activity Monitor on my (functioning) MacBook Pro (10.5.8) doesn't have anything on it about 'kernel tasks'.
 
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