Problems with my iBook G4 (1 Viewer)

[Matthew Chmiel]

Hopefully some Mac people visit this forum and they can help me out on this.

I bought an iBook G4 (800 MHz and 640MB of RAM) back in November for my birthday, and I haven't had any problems until now.

When I woke up this morning to turn it on, my computer has been running extremely slow. Programs take minutes to start up, I can't listen to my music on iTunes without the program stopping and/or freezing, and tasks just take minutes at a time to complete.

Are there any diagnostics program I can run on it (are there any Mac programs like scandisk or disk defragmenter) or could this be a hardware issue?

 

[Kris McLaughlin]

The first thing to try is to repair your disk permissions.
Applications --> Utilities --> Disk Utility, then select your drive in the pane on the left.
Hit the 'Repair Disk Permissions' button & let it rip. If it looks like it's correcting a lot of problems, you might want to restart the machine & do it again until it doesn't find any problems.
If that doesn't help, try out DiskWarrior or TechTool.

 

[Matthew Chmiel]

Kris, I just tried that after I posted this message, and it still goes slow.

I'll try out those two programs next.

 

[SethH]

Do you run MacOS X or 9.xxx? If you're running OS X you shouldn't need to defrag as it's a Unix-based system which essentially defrags itself.

 

[Matthew Chmiel]

No, OS X. I'm new to the Mac OS, okay? I've been a Windows guy for almost a decade. Cut me some friggin' slack!

I just went down to the Apple store (since I have a three-year warranty) and they checked it out. After an hour of hardware and diagnostic tests, everything came back fine. They said it was a software problem so they turned on the computer and went through what programs I had installed. They saw LimeWire and Posioned, and said that was my problem.

I deleted everything involving those two programs and my computer is running fine now.

Weird.

 

[Ken Chan]

In the future, you can run the Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder) which is kinda like the Task Manager in Windows (NT/2K/XP). In fact, you can keep a small CPU monitor visible in a corner somewhere so you can tell if something is hogging up the system.

 

[Tony Kwong]

I just use the old fashioned "Top" command in terminal...

 

[Peter Kim]

Thanks for the 'Top' command Tony. While it would be nice to keep it on, I noticed that it consumes anywhere from ~7 to 14% CPU.

Forgot to add...yeah, LimeWire really is quite the hog. I might as well forget about using anything else, since everything drags so much while it's on.

Another app that affects performance is Toast Titanium 6.0.7. Whenever running, this is about the worst my iMac G4 runs. Run this concurrently with LimeWire, FireFox and VLC and I can play a game of Bejeweled on my Palm Tungsten between each lag.

 

[Anthony Hom]

Instead of using Limewire, you should use Acquisition (look at any free download site). It uses limewire core engine, but is much better for OSX users than regular Limewire. I have little problems with acquisition on 10.3

 

[Ken Chan]

If you've got a big desktop, you can leave a Terminal window with top open, but in most cases, especially with an iBook, the little CPU meter takes up a lot less space. Or you can even have it display in the Dock icon, if you keep the Dock visible at all times.