What's wrong with my mac?

[danakm]

I'm starting to freak out because my mac is acting generally strange. These are the symptoms:

• Slow start-up. It takes a while for it to go from blank-screen to Apple logo to the spinning-wheel-thingy

Comments

[madbard]

I would have guessed a hard drive problem. You could try re-installing OSX, but it sounds like a hardware issue and that your computer should be taken to the nearest Apple Store for examination.

[danakm]

I am more of a DIY person ;)

[madbard]

In that case I would recommend getting a job at the Apple store and undergoing training that will allow you to diagnose and repair the problem, ordering replacement parts where necessary.

[danakm]

If it is the HD, replacing a hard drive is the simplest thing to do after replacing RAM. I highly doubt such a simple procedure requires a person to undergo long specialized training, unless that person is highly tech-incompetent.

[ibneko]

The startup chime thing is odd. That is, I believe, the mac indicator of a POST (Power On Self Test) success/failure indicator and I don't believe it cares about hard drive contents.

I'm suspecting a flaky memory chip myself (although I've also seen similar issues when my GPU was dying. But that was back on a much older MacBook Pro, related to this and probably not applicable to you). Steps you could take to eliminate some things

[danakm]

I don't seem to be able to make the mac start from hardware test to save my life. I've tried pressing the D key at different moments and for different durations of time to no avail :( Ideas?

Never mind. After trying several suggestions found in Apple forums I finally got one that worked. We'll see how this goes...

[wibbble]

8 GB of RAM isn't a large amount these days, and Safari will leak memory over time. Photoshop will just use lots of it right off the bat.

My feeling would be that your real problem is a dying hard drive.

[danakm]

Well, yes and no on the RAM. Yes, you can get lots more these days, but no, you shouldn't need to for mundane tasks. My mother has an old PC with 2GB RAM that works perfectly fine for the tasks I just listed, so yeah. Photoshop ran perfectly smoothly when I just had 4GB, so that can't be it and the problems aren't isolated to times when I use power-hungry apps, it's all the time, no matter what.

Yep, I've been suspecting as much, though many others have blamed the RAM. I might have to just get over it and open this thing to swap things and see if I find the issue :/

[wibbble]

Safari with a handful of tabs, especially if you have Flash installed, will eat 5GB+ by itself. I've seen it with my own eyes! Restarting it makes it use a more sensible amount of RAM, so there must be some horrible leak in it somewhere.

For the RAM and battery life benefits, I don't have Flash installed on my MacBook Pro.

[danakm]

True, and that's why I have Flash blocked myself as well :)

[porsupah]

One rather geeky option is smartmontools, a pair of command line utilities for inspecting detailed SMART data. Perhaps the easiest method of installing them is with either MacPorts or Fink, which take care of any dependencies, making installation just a "set it going and wait" process.

Once in place, use smartctl -a /dev/disk0 -s on to set it to work. In the output, you should see a table of the various attributes, including Reallocated_Sector_Ct (id number 5) and Reallocated_Event_Count (id number 196). A perfect drive will have zero for both, but you may find dozens or hundreds - that's not perfect, but nothing to be alarmed over. If you see millions, then it's time to order a replacement, and make sure your Time Machine backup is up to date.

[danakm]

I might have to look into that. Thanks so much! :)

[paranoiattaque]

hard drive failure, back up your data etc.

[danakm]

What gives it away from the symptoms? Just curious, not doubting you (specially because I had that very fear).