Files take ages to open

T

themc

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I'm getting very acquainted with the spinning rainbow. It can take a minute or two just to open or edit a file. I can't get work done. OS 10.4.5 Graphite iMac. Appleworks 6. Please keep answers simple like me.
 
How often do you maintenance your Macintosh, repairing permission, empty cache, etc?
If not that frequent, or unclear download a program called Onyx, it runs some routine maintenance scripts to clean your system.
 
Also, how much space is left on your iMac? OS X needs to have a decent amoutn of space left in order to do some system caching and stuff (I know it's not a technical description, but from what I've read from others here, low drive space has caused problems for OS X).
 
powermac said:
How often do you maintenance your Macintosh, repairing permission, empty cache, etc?
If not that frequent, or unclear download a program called Onyx, it runs some routine maintenance scripts to clean your system.
Click to expand...

Thanks to all for the suggestions. I'll try to cover each.

I try to maintain and I restart when I strike problems. I downloaded Onyx. Looks excellent. I ran everything that looked reasonable under 'Maintanance', 'Cleaning' etc. I restarted a few times as it requested.

An hour later I still have the problem. It can take me a minute or so to open a file and sometimes when I try to move the page up or down with the righthand slide, I may get the spinning rainbow ball for a minute or so. Sometimes the ball changes to a steady black and white one. It may then go back to the rainbow one for another minute or so. While the balls are showing, nothing else happens.

Someone suggested I check available space. Memory. I have the widget iStat nano installed. Under 'Memory' it says: Wired = 54Mb, Inactive = 108Mb, Free = 5Mb, Active = 215Mb, Used = 379Mb and Swap = 512Mb. I'm unsure what this means.

I am just about to dump a few hundred emails. Perhaps that may help.
 
I should have been a little more specific. What I meant was not RAM memory, but hard drive storage space that is available. If there's very little (compared to the size of the hard drive itself), then that might be the cause of the slowdowns.

I sent you a private message, btw, about how to "Get Info" on the hard drive. :)
 
One other thing to understand is that you're dealing with an older generation Mac. I've used 10.2 on a similar iMac running at 600 MHz with 256 MB and while usable, it does take it's sweet time in opening and scrolling. That's just the nature of the beast sometimes with these older machines. There's a lot of code in the newer operating systems like Mac OS X that would get processed faster by the newer machines but take some time to be processed in older ones. Originally, your Mac was meant to run OS 9 speedily and while still supported for OS X, because of the code in OS X it has more that it has to process.
 
I am using 8Gb on the HD with 20Gb unused. So it can't be that. I take the point about the older computer. It's 500Mhz and 10.4.5 may be a challenge, but 1 minute to open some one page files is ridiculous.
 
Going back to system RAM, if you head to the Apple menu and select "About this Mac," you should be able to see how much RAM you have installed. That Dashboard widget is giving you information on RAM usage, but we need to know how much RAM you actually have. If you're running Tiger on 256 MB alone, that could explain the sluggishness.

The other thing you might want to do is if you have the 10.4.x installation discs, boot up from them. Insert the discs, reboot, and hold down C after you hear the startup chime. You'll know you're booted into the CD when it tries to go through the installation. When you get the the welcome screen, head over to File and select to Launch Disk Utility. Once that launches, select your hard drive and perform a Repair Disk on it. Once you've gone through the repairs where it says that the "volume is OK", reboot the Mac and hold down the mouse button after the startup chime (so that the installation disc ejects) and let the Mac boot back to your Finder desktop. Try launching some applications and see if they come up any quicker than before.

Good luck. :)
 
The math on the hd space doesn't add up. 8gig HD with 20gig free???

There's a long discussion about hd free space here

The short of it is you need at least 10% of your total hd space free for swap files and other stuff. I ran a 30gig disk down to less than one gig free and it screwed up the system, I had to re-install.
 
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