Another Mac question/problem.

How full is your hard drive? Look on a Finder window at the bottom to see the amount of free space.

Have you got many apps running even though you have closed the windows.

Hard drive has 268 Gb used 231 Gb free.

Could you explain apps please? Are they the icons running along the bottom of the screen?
If yes then 20, mail, safari iPhoto, itunes etc.

9 or 10 processes showing on activity monitor.

quote:

Hard drive has 268 Gb used 231 Gb free.

There is your problem - Mac's page to disk as do any Unix systems and they are not keen on having nearly full disks - make sure you have got rid of all the rubbish on your disk - e.g. log files

A quick way to do this

Open Terminal, located in the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder.

At the Terminal prompt, type the following, exactly as written:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

Press Return.

Type your (admin) password when prompted, then press Return.

Wait - it takes a while.

You may want to try ice clean (google it) it'll clean up your mac and get rid of lots of garbage that above routine misses. Cache cleaning is a temporary fix, but you may lose all your cookies so need to log in to fora like this again.

Long term - try to keep the disk at less than 80% used (or less if possible) and you may want to get some extra memory to stop it paging (you'll hear if it is paging). Another suggestion is just keep your Apple applications and OSX on the primary disk and put all your data on another disk such as a FAS (Firewire Attached Storage).

quote:

Hard drive has 268 Gb used 231 Gb free.

That's just over half full by my reckoning.

I have 2 Gb of memory installed.

Are there any recommended FAS drives or any to avoid ?

There is loads of room on there.

Does paridise use flash to play you music? I would run something like onyx and make sure you are fully up together in terms of software.

Macaroni will run the housekeeping and regular Permissions Repair.

Did you do the last Software Update by Software update or by a download of the Combo update method.

ONYX does exactly the same but is freeware.

Software updates are by the mac telling me there are software updates, I know of no other way.
I just checked it said all was up to date.

Radio Paradise uses iTunes to play 128k AAC stream ( I couldn't get the 192k Octoshape stream to work).

Drive looks like 53% full to me too.

What does ONYX do?

quote:

Originally posted by BigH47:
I have 2 Gb of memory installed.

Are there any recommended FAS drives or any to avoid ?

Apologies - my brain switched off I read it as 231 out of 268 when that is not what you said. You've only used half your disk so ignore what I said - the clean up routine is still a good idea though.

If you want to see what is running then run Activity Monitor, which is again located in the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder

This will show you what processes are running on your computer and how much of its resources they are using. Select "All Processes" from the drop down menu at the top. Ignore the odd named ones, but you'll see some apps with their icons that you may not be using that are taking up some memory. I can see on mine that of I quit Mail I get back 8 MB of real memory and if I quit Safari I'd get back 152.47 MB - you may find a hint about some memory hog you're running and not using. You should quit what you don't need.

If you select System Memory towards the bottom of the Monitor you can see how much free memory you've got - you'll also see the paging statistics I was referring to. What you'd like is a bit of green in the pie as that means you've got ample RAM. Ideally you'd like no paging out.

A small gain is made by going into the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder running Directory Services and disabling them all.

HTH Rotf

PS I use a LaCie FAS which is great for backing up the system using CCC.
If anything should go wrong with my system then I can reboot and restore from this disk.
Yes you could use Time Capsule or something else, but I've done that way since the dawn of OS X and what were once habits are now vices.

quote:

What does ONYX do?

Nothing that ice clean doesn't - sorry I was never a fan of Onyx, but now you have to buy it, it may have improved. ice clean is free and supplied with source code (not that that is of great interest unless you fancy compiling it yourself).

Onyx will run the commands I've suggested from a nice GUI plus some other things such as clearing the cache, fixing file permissions and optimising by rebuilding prebindings (not necessary in Tiger/Leopard and Snow Leopard). If any of these thing cause a dramatic performance hike I'll be surprised, but you could give it a go using the trail version. I've used Onyx in the past and it slowed things down - possibly because it removed preferences files which the system had to recreate - it gets back to normal after not too long and I agree it is no bad thing to do this.

ICE CLEAN = Maintenance Processes

Periodic Routine Scripts (As I described earlier)
Mac OS X performs background maintenance tasks at certain times if the computer is not in sleep mode. If your computer is shut down or in sleep at the designated times, the maintenance does not occur. In that case, you may want or need to run these manually.

Update Prebindings
Prebindings allow applications to launch faster.
With 10.4/5/6 your prebindings are updated every time you run an Apple Installer.

Verify Preference Files
Sometimes Preferences Files (.plist) become corrupt. You should verify your preferences whenever your applications unexpectly quit or something crashes.

Repair Permissions
Most users of Mac OS X have not intentionally modified privileges and simply need a utility to reset system privileges to their correct default values. Mac OS X incorporates a subsystem based on a UNIX-style operating system that uses permissions in the file system

Clear Caches
Even though running the routine maintenance scripts clears out some temporary files, none of the system caches are touched by them. So it is a good idea to occasionally also use a utility that trashes the system caches, and occasionally your Internet browser caches. Deleting caches won't hurt anything. However, over time a cache speeds up your computer (assuming that you do some things repetitively), so if you aren't experiencing any problems, you may want to leave your caches alone. On the other hand, if it has been ages since you have flushed your caches, or if your computer is running slowly, or if you are experiencing odd problems, it might be a good idea to flush them.

It does a 1001 other things too.

As stated ONYX is free. Not that I have any particular affiliation with it. I run it, it works, good enough for me.

Its been such a long time since I had to route out a problem I cannot really give any answers. The first thing I try is logging into a guest account and doing things form there. If anything runs smoothly you at least know it might well be in your home folder.

Hang on

He has Macaroni - it does the Daily Weekly Monthly maintenance tasks - it also runs Permission Repair on a regular basis - it also removes unwanted language (localised) files for applications thus saving some disk space.

Re Combo Updates

Go to Apple downloads
http://support.apple.com/downloads/#macosandsoftware

and select the latest Combo update for the version of OSX in this case the 10.6.4 Update Combo

download and run

This will ensure that the software is at the correct level - the auto Software Update process can in some cases lead to miss-matching modules that can cause various types of problems.

OK I did the combo update a week or so ago. A n iTunes update also a few days ago.

I don't see so many beach balls but activity monitor (system memory) shows

Free 70.1 Gbs ................ VM size 137.11
Wired 169 ...................... Page ins 707
Active 1.2....................... Page outs 99
Inactive 578. .................... Swaps used 368
Used 1.98

This doesn't look correct to me.

Depends what you have going on. A better way to look is in the main window, make sure you have al processes running then click on SPU at the top this will ist everything in order of CPU usage. If something is crashing out it will show as 100% usage.