OS X 10.3 Sluggish

B

bcapwell

Registered
Hi,

I inherited a mac were I work, the prior employee didnt maintain it to well. Its a G5 Tower Dual 1.8ghz processors I believe. It begins to run very sluggishly after a couple of hours e.g. mouse cursor doesn't travel across screen smoothly, type doesn't come up right away, and windows dont flow when minimized. I'm new to mac's I know how to use them but not maintain them, I've done some maintenance tasks that i've found on the web such as repairing permissions and running onyx. One other thing I forgot to mention is the dvd rom drive stops responding, it wont open when I press the eject button, the icon comes up on screen but the try stays closed. When I restart the computer the tray opens on reboot.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,
 
You can try to perform an Archive and Install installation using the discs that shipped with that Mac. It's possible that this previous user might have mucked something up.

As for ejecting a CD/DVD that might be in the drive, hold down the mouse button after you hear the Macintosh startup chime during a reboot. The drive should forcibly eject the disc.
 
Thanks for the repy, if i do an archive and install will I lose files? I work at a printshop and I have job files on my computer, will those be moved over to the new install? Also will I have to reinstall quark and cs2 suite and other third party programs like that?
 
Yes and no. Most programmes will survive the Archive & Install because their essential files are stored in /home/library. Some may not. I would go with NixGeek's advice.
 
will archive and install save the files that were in the desktop ?

im having a similar problem and was wondering if whatever is on the desktop will be moved to another folder.
 
I haven't performed the archive and install yet, to busy, but I did notice when I used the problematic mac today that the when it is acting sluggish that the mouse cursor changes and becomes and enlarged version, only for a split second, the color changes as well from black or white to a static pink and orange look...I know it sounds weird. I'm gonna try and do the archive and install tommorow afternoon.
 
Before you try an archive and install, try running Activity Monitor in /Applications/Preferences. Click the CPU tab and look to see if there's a program running that's hogging a huge amount of processor time, such as Finder or TrueBlueEnv. If so, click it and Force-Quit the app.

Let us know if you need more info.

Doug
 
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