beach ball of death!! ADVICE PLEASE.

M

motorgirl

Registered
I have a dual 2.5 G5 with 3 gigs of RAM & OS 10.3.7

Everytime I do something (even little things) like closing a Safari window, the fan goes on and the ball starts spinning. There's a pause and then the action takes place after the fan quiets down.
Is this normal?

I find it hard to belive that one of the so-called fastest machines out there is so slow!!! Too much fan activity.

Same thing in photoshop when I do small things like rotate a jpg.

I have already used Disk Warrior and repaired permissions.

Any advice is appreciated!!! : )
Thanx
Brigitte
 
It is certainly not normal, I very rarely hear the fans on my Dual 1.8Ghz G5. I have come across a couple of Dual 2Ghz where the fans start spinning at full speed and will not stop until the machine is powered down.

You could try running Activity Monitor at the same time and see if something is hogging the processors and causing the cooling rate to be increased.
 
Could be a problem with a processor and heat maybe? Definitely run Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities) and watch if you CPU gets pegged when you try and do something. You can click on the % CPU column header to sort the highest CPU process to the top. But no this is NOT normal. I suspect you will need to have it looked at. Have you tried calling 1-800-APL-CARE?
 
I second what NW_Mike says. Try running Activity Monitor to see if there are any rogue processes that are hogging all your CPU time. Post back with what you find.
 
Make sure you've downloaded any and all necessary firmware updates from System Prefs/Software Update. I have heard of problems the cooling fans occuring, and sometimes it's the result of bad firmware. Other times it's just faulty hardware.

Hopefully you got AppleCare so you can return it if you don't find a solution.

Here's the google page I found for "Mac G5 fan runs too much":
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...cial_s&q=Mac+G5+fan+runs+too+much&btnG=Search

Here's a link to one of the pages for 10.3.4 firmware update (most of these updates suck till you get to 10.3.7, I think): http://macintouch.com/panreader32.html

Let us know if your problem gets resolved and definitely try more things and ask more questions. :)
 
My wife was making a similar complaint about her G4/733 Quicksilver the other evening. It turned out that one way or another her energy saver settings had gotten bolixed up and her hard drive was spinning down while she was working. Then when she would save she would always get the spinning beach ball while the drive spun up again and if the room was especially quiet you could hear the drive spooling up and it sounded like the fan. I was able to "fix" the problem using Cocktail 3.5.1 which lets you specify a specific interval of inactivity up to an hour before the hard drive spins down.

Later on she became really worried by the noise which had gotten a lot louder. It was her CD drive that time and it really is noisy when it is spinning up.

Whether this is the case with your G5 or not, it might be worth checking.
 
Motogirl, as a test you can go to Apple Menu > System Preferences and click on the lightbulb (energy saver settings). Uncheck the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" by clicking on the checkbox.

If that solves the problem, chalk one up to the perfessor.

To save electricity, OS X is telling the hard drive to spin down after a period of inactivity. When you do something that needs the hard drive--which can be ANYTHING such as closing a window, rotating an image, etc.--you have to wait while the hard drive "spins up".

If you don't care about saving electricity, leave the option unchecked.

Doug
 
The drives will still go to sleep with the option unchecked - it just takes them being idle for 3 hours (180 min) and they'll sleep.
 
I think that might be dependent on the drive, and if the drive is programmed to sleep in that amount of time... or is it something with the SATA specification?

If I leave the option to spin down drives unchecked, my drives will never spin down... doesn't matter if I'm logged in, logged out, FUS'ed, no mouse/keyboard activity, etc...
 
Well, the main drive does usually get written to/read from at some point (even if your machine is idle), which will reset the three hour wait period. For secondary drives it all depends on if something in the system has files open on that drive or not.

If you have the Developer Tools installed, and also the CHUD tools, you have a program called SpindownHD at /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/CHUD/Hardware Tools that will confirm what I'm saying.
 
I feel a little cheap for bringing this up, Motorgirl, but since you mentioned Photoshop usage, you might want to keep an eye on how much scratch disk space you have available. I've noticed that Photoshop CS gives you the 'beach ball' on simple tasks if you don't have at least 20GB free a Dual G4, and even more open scratch disk space for a G5. That being said, rotating the entire contents of your file isn't a simple task, when you think about the math your machine has to do.

It's not a bad idea to partition your HD so that the primary scratch has most of the open space as well, but you may not need such a drastic solution. Heat can also play a factor as NW_Mike suggested...I've noticed less fan noise in the Dual G5s at work since I decided to pull them off the desks and mount underneath...the extra few degrees of shade, and lack of obstacles for air circulation down there has made a difference.
 
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