my iBook runs slowwwww

J

jeepster485

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My iBook hasn't been restarted in 8 days or so. I've gotten by without a restart for up to a month with no issues. But for some reason it's running like poopoo. If you click on something in the dock it takes a good 3 seconds for it to register and start bouncing. When iTunes loads, the beach ball comes up for a good 20+ seconds before I can actually do anything. And it just plain runs slow switching between programs and actually trying to use it. Aside from the obvious of restarting, is there anything I can do to make it a little more happy and not so slow like it's choking?
 
Try going into Applications/Utilities and running Disk Utility. Do a Repair Permissions on your drive and see how that improves things.
Failing that, try going into Terminal and typing sudo update_prebinding -root / - You'll be prompted for your password, and the prebindings will then be fixed.
If that fails to improve matters, you'll probably want to reinstall Mac OS X.
 
how much ram do you use? Did you check your cpu activity? Maybe you need to delete the dock plist. One way to check, if something is wrong with your system preferences, you can simply add a fresh new account and test your system. If it runs a lot faster, your plist files are somehow screwed. If you can trace the problem down to a certain application preferences file, simply delete it. Otherwise you should migrate to the new account (comes close to reinstall the system).
 
Naw, I wouldn't say a reinstall is needed.

Probably, you've got virtual memory going, which writes to your HD and makes the system seem dog slow. If you've got a bunch of applications running, try quitting some of them and see if that improves the speed. The #1 hog on my iBook always seems to be Safari (that is, if I keep it running for a few days), so I always quit it every once in a while.
 
has journaling been turned on accidentally... I just found out why the heck my computer was sluggish doing certain things. I think somehow I accidentally enabled, journaling.
 
mi5moav said:
has journaling been turned on accidentally... I just found out why the heck my computer was sluggish doing certain things. I think somehow I accidentally enabled, journaling.
Click to expand...
Accidentally? Journaling is on be default in Panther, and under tests that I have seen, has very little noticeable affect on performance, certainly not causing a gradual slow-down as in this case. Also under Panther, enabling journaling also allows the automatic file optimizing to function, with the possible result of faster performance in the long term.
 
My laptop only has 256mb of ram. I know that it could use more but I don't have the money at the moment with school and a car to take care of. I'm still running Jaguar so I don't think journaling could be turned on. I have over 7gb free on the hard drive so the virtual memory swap has more than enough space. Before putting the computer to sleep at night I quit all the programs that are running - I've never gotten into the habit of leaving them open for some reason. I did the daily, weekly, monthly system cleanup things that are suppose to be run. I just repaired disk permissions and restart it so if I'm lucky it'll run a little better. After permissions were repaired the icons on the dock seemed to work the way they normally do where they start to bounce as soon as you click on them. Plus it doesn't seem as sluggish as before so I think permissions may have been the issue. Thanks for responding!
 
Darkshadow is likely correct (as usual ;)

My iBook has 320 megs of RAM and normally it runs a peak speed. However, when the free space on the hard disk gets below about 800 megs the swap file starts eating up the free space until I have no hard disk space left and the system slows to a crawl.

The only solution is to maintain, as a rule of thumb, at least 1 GB free on any Panther startup volume (or swap volume if you moved the file) and if that's impossible, reboot.

In passing, journaling does indeed use more disk space but it is, in my opinion, one of the most invaluable features of Panther since it lets you recover from a disk crash easily and quickly. Unless you have a serious reason to disable disk journaling I would absolutely recommend you leave it enabled.
 
Journaling in Panther is good, but journaling in Jaguar caused ~10% performance hit. I'm not sure I'd use journaling in Jag.

Doug
 
If you have gotten by for 2 months without restarting, how about restarting a little more often? :) Repairing permissions is good, and also I would try command + option + escape to see if you have a program that's trying to crash (will be listed red) but can't quite do it. Force Quit that program and see if things speed up again.

Do a hardware test with the cd that came with your computer and see if you have any motherboard or RAM issues.
 
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