I have a MacBook and we recently installed some OS updates, and the system prompted us to restarted which we did and when it rebooted the system hung on the white screen with the spinning wheel for at least a couple of hours. So we had to hold the power button down to get the system to shut down, so we rebooted and it stalled at the same screen, so we did a hard shutdown, booted into safe mode which worked fine, and then rebooted from safe mode normally, and it booted fine into normal mode. Only thing the system is running very slow, and it seems unresponsive. As in the system would normally take about 40 seconds 1 minute to load the desktop now it takes about 5 minutes or so and every action that we do such as clicking on an icon takes about 5 minute for the action to complete. Time Machine has not been setup, so there are no backups. First Aid reports no problems with the disk, and really we could format/reinstall the OS if we needed to, but is there any solution?
MS OS updates casued system to crash
- Thread starter Josh1
- Start date
DeltaMac
Tech
Launch your Activity Monitor (in your /Applications/Utilities folder)
Make sure that the drop-down is set for All Processes, and not just My Processes.
Click on the CPU header to sort by CPU usage.
What are the top two or three items in the list of processes?
Click on the System Memory tab near the bottom of the window. Are there large amounts of Page-outs, and Swap used? (those items, in normal use, will often show zero)
Click on the Disk Usage tab. How much Free Space do you have? If less than 1 GB, your hard drive is simply too full, and activity will slow down to something like you see.
Make sure that the drop-down is set for All Processes, and not just My Processes.
Click on the CPU header to sort by CPU usage.
What are the top two or three items in the list of processes?
Click on the System Memory tab near the bottom of the window. Are there large amounts of Page-outs, and Swap used? (those items, in normal use, will often show zero)
Click on the Disk Usage tab. How much Free Space do you have? If less than 1 GB, your hard drive is simply too full, and activity will slow down to something like you see.
Well when I say reinstalled I mean also format/reinstall. We have 77.9 GB free, really we could spend time trying to fix it but really there is no data on here that we need so we can just do a clean install. I had to boot into safe mode because it just runs to slow, I can tell you what is running as you told me to do but with it being in safe mode I am not sure if this will tell you what is really running.
DeltaMac
Tech
IMHO, Format/reinstall is a last resort, not one of the first things to try.
I only mentioned the Activity Monitor, because that may give you a clue that some app or service is taking over your system, and then returning here with the names of two or three apps/services. For example, it's quite common for the "mdworker" process, or another part of the Spotlight service to begin a runaway, and apparently never stop processing files for the search database. A simple reset of the spotlight service can fix that, but one has to look around a little for the easy fix - much simpler than a "nuke 'n pave" that one might do very quickly on a windows system. Even a default reinstall of 10.6 probably would fix your issue, without having to erase and reinstall everything.
I only mentioned the Activity Monitor, because that may give you a clue that some app or service is taking over your system, and then returning here with the names of two or three apps/services. For example, it's quite common for the "mdworker" process, or another part of the Spotlight service to begin a runaway, and apparently never stop processing files for the search database. A simple reset of the spotlight service can fix that, but one has to look around a little for the easy fix - much simpler than a "nuke 'n pave" that one might do very quickly on a windows system. Even a default reinstall of 10.6 probably would fix your issue, without having to erase and reinstall everything.