Slow Laptop, so i think i should....

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blackoutspy

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My laptop has been running slow recently after 3 days of up time, so that could be the issue, but i was under the impression that mac's didn't need to reboot. Anywho, I've done a little research and found that most of you say to run cocktail (or onyx i guess) and defragment. I have and run cocktail quite often and am always pleased when i do. Now im trying to defrag using diskwarrior, but i've found a problem. Diskwarrior cannot perform on the drive where OS X residers, or where DiskWarrior itself resides. Therein lies the problem, i only have one partition/drive. So how am i suposed to do this? Any help would be much appreciated i've read through the manual and its still kind of vague.
 
I've heard that you use disk warrior from the CD and not to run it from your hard drive. I dunno if that will help but thats what I've heard. Also you might wanna check their site - might be some help there.
 
blackoutspy said:
My laptop has been running slow recently after 3 days of up time, so that could be the issue, but i was under the impression that mac's didn't need to reboot. Anywho, I've done a little research and found that most of you say to run cocktail (or onyx i guess) and defragment. I have and run cocktail quite often and am always pleased when i do. Now im trying to defrag using diskwarrior, but i've found a problem. Diskwarrior cannot perform on the drive where OS X residers, or where DiskWarrior itself resides. Therein lies the problem, i only have one partition/drive. So how am i suposed to do this? Any help would be much appreciated i've read through the manual and its still kind of vague.
Click to expand...

DiskWarrior will only check a non-startup Volume. So put the DiskWarrior CD in, Restart while holding down the option key and choose the DiskWarrior CD (or just hold down the C button during the reboot).

However, I need to ask some questions, do you sleep the Mac at night? If so, download MacJanitor. The program runs the Unix cron jobs (that rotate log files) that are set to run in the long hours of the night. Plus, go to Applications->Utilties->Disk Utility and highlight your OS X drive then Repair Permissions. OS X is BSD Unix based and Unix loves it permissions. Software developers all think their software is of the highest order and will mess with your drive's permissions. This should done after most every big software install (including Apple updates) and about once every two weeks. This will save a lot of future headaches.

I hope this helps you. Good luck.
 
If he's running Cocktail, the log files are already getting rotated.

Blackoutspy: How and when is your laptop running slowly? What kind of laptop? Operating system version? Amount of memory installed? Free space on your hard drive? What programs are you running?

You can also use Activity Monitor in Applications>Utilities to see what programs are running and how much CPU time they're using.

Doug
 
oh im sorry, i faild to mention my set-up, as pointed out by dktrickey. I am running a 17" G4 laptop, 1ghz, 512mb ram and OS X v10.2.8. It seems to run slower when it has been on for a while. Weather or not i sleep my system depends on if im downloading something over night. If i am, i just turn the screen off, otherwise i close it. I never shut it down.
 
OS X does _not_ need to be rebooted periodically like previous Mac OSs and Win 3.x/95/98/ME. That common troubleshooting practice of rebooting the machine generally doesn't apply to your Mac.

Among other problems, less sophisticated operating systems did not have protected memory (even 95/98/ME did not have fully protected mem) and the longer the computer was running, the more likely there would be memory corruption.

My longest uptime on my iBook and iMac was about a month. I noticed no slowdown. Generally speaking, I shut down only for thunderstorms and reboot only for system updates.

Did you check Activity Monitor? You can click on the "CPU" column title to sort running programs by processor usage.

And again, what kind of programs are you running when you notice the slowdown? If it's games, that's a whole other can of worms.

Doug
 
Have a look, with a CPU monitor (like 'top' in the Terminal) at scitzophrenic processes like:
• Safari
• Microsoft Office (Word in particular)
• iTunes
and sometimes even the Finder

I've noticed, especially with Safari that after a certain amount of time it starts using lots and lots of CPU time without really doing anything at all! Usually quitting that/those app/s solves that problem.

What about logging in and out? If that helps then you probably have some kind of runaway process issue (since logging out quits all your apps and flushes the cache, I believe).
 
since repairing permissions, and repairing my disk with DiskWarrior, i havn't experianced the slow down i did early last week. I have also noticed a signifigante amount of CPU power going to AOL instant messanger, when i notice this i quite the app, and my cpu usages drops to a normal idle percentage of around 8%. Maybe AOL is that run away app.
 
actually adium is really terrible when it decides to mess up, I have noticed my fan whirring away from across the room and found adium using 70-80% of the processor until its force quit.

but yeah, its still cool.
 
ahh i've only been using adium for a half a day so i havn't really seen the long term effects, but so far, it doesn't take enormus amounts of cycles to idle. so far....
 
Adium's nice. I've used it on and off for awhile, but in the end I usually go back to iChat because it's integrated *very* well into the rest of the OS.
Other AIM clients you can try:
Proteus
Fire

Those are both 'muti-service' clients, so if you also use MSN or Yahoo or something (I don't), they're really nice.
 
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