Hanging applications, VERY slow OS X

H

hereforever

Registered
I've been having major issues with my G4 Powerbook 15" recently.
here are the specs in case that's helpful, machine model: PowerBook5,2 CPU type 1.1, CPU speed 1.25 Ghz

The first problem I was having was that sometimes on restarts the hard drive wasn't being detected properly and I would get the blinking question mark, flashing folder icon (i.e. couldn't detect a startup disk). I spent a good week ago trying to fix this problem and ended up deciding that the hard drive must have been beginning to fail. The other symptom I was having with this was that the hard drive seemed excessively slow, applications hanging, beachball icon, etc. I assumed this problem was related to the hard drive failing. So I ended up replacing the factory drive with a 40GB Seagate brand new drive.

I reinstalled OSX on the new drive and unfortunately everything was still running slow. I ran fsck, repaired disk permissions, zapped the pram, tried OSX as a different user...nothing seemed to help. Also, nothing of any interest is coming up in the Console.

Could this be the sign of a dying processor or battery? The battery only holds charge now for 30min-45min but the symptoms occur whether the computer is plugged in through the power supply or not.

Any help would be much appreciated, I'm extremely frustrated at this point and kicking myself for not getting Applecare. I didn't realize that Powerbook's had so many problems.
 
Any computer can have problems and any laptop will by and large and on the average have more than desktops but your PowerBook is still a good machine. Batteries can often be resuscitated by Calibrating the battery (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86284) and/or resetting the PMU (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=14449. There are also steps you can take to maximize your battery's charge (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50666) and the Battery University (http://www.batteryuniversity.com/ offers some excellent tips to maximize battery life.

Of course none of this addresses the slow performance. A failing processor will generally show up as frequent crashes and/or kernel panics but the Apple Hardware Test that came with your PB has an excellent set of diagnostics that should tell you if that is the case.
  • According to Apple System Profiler, how much RAM do you have?
  • How much free space is there on your new 40GB drive?
  • On the Finder menu: Go > Go To Folder /private/var/vm and check the number and size of the swapfiles?
  • Grab a copy of the freeware XBench http://xbench.com/ and run it to see how your PB compares with similar PBs and where any slowdowns are appearing?
 
thanks for your ideas

1. 512 mb ram
2. there is 28.8gb left on the drive
3. one swapfile now, although a couple of days ago there were 2...each 64mb
4. couldn't get the Xbench results to upload

here they are:
Results 40.97
System Info
Xbench Version 1.2
System Version 10.4.4 (8G32)
Physical RAM 512 MB
Model PowerBook5,2
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.25 GHz
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.25 GHz
Bus Frequency 167 MHz
Video Card ATY,RV350M10
Drive Type ST9402112A
CPU Test 42.62
GCD Loop 65.31 3.44 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 25.60 608.21 Mflop/sec
vecLib FFT 68.95 2.27 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 40.05 6.97 Mops/sec
Thread Test 51.75
Computation 48.90 990.71 Kops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 54.95 2.36 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 26.49
System 31.72
Allocate 106.77 392.10 Kalloc/sec
Fill 32.83 1596.50 MB/sec
Copy 18.26 377.23 MB/sec
Stream 22.74
Copy 24.06 496.89 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale 23.10 477.30 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 21.96 467.76 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad 21.96 469.88 MB/sec [altivec]
Quartz Graphics Test 78.29
Line 60.46 4.03 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 75.77 22.62 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 76.28 6.22 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 72.21 1.82 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 139.46 8.72 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 61.14
Spinning Squares 61.14 77.56 frames/sec
User Interface Test 51.16
Elements 51.16 234.80 refresh/sec
Disk Test 24.02
Sequential 30.48
Uncached Write 36.28 22.27 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 50.76 28.72 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 21.66 6.34 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 26.46 13.30 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 19.82
Uncached Write 6.93 0.73 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 36.17 11.58 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 61.04 0.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 73.67 13.67 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 
thanks for your ideas.
1. 512 mb RAM
2. 28.8gb left on the drive
3. 1 swap file 64mb large, although a couple days ago there were 2
4. couldn't get the xbench results to upload, so here they are

Results 40.97
System Info
Xbench Version 1.2
System Version 10.4.4 (8G32)
Physical RAM 512 MB
Model PowerBook5,2
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.25 GHz
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.25 GHz
Bus Frequency 167 MHz
Video Card ATY,RV350M10
Drive Type ST9402112A
CPU Test 42.62
GCD Loop 65.31 3.44 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 25.60 608.21 Mflop/sec
vecLib FFT 68.95 2.27 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 40.05 6.97 Mops/sec
Thread Test 51.75
Computation 48.90 990.71 Kops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 54.95 2.36 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 26.49
System 31.72
Allocate 106.77 392.10 Kalloc/sec
Fill 32.83 1596.50 MB/sec
Copy 18.26 377.23 MB/sec
Stream 22.74
Copy 24.06 496.89 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale 23.10 477.30 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 21.96 467.76 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad 21.96 469.88 MB/sec [altivec]
Quartz Graphics Test 78.29
Line 60.46 4.03 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 75.77 22.62 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 76.28 6.22 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 72.21 1.82 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 139.46 8.72 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 61.14
Spinning Squares 61.14 77.56 frames/sec
User Interface Test 51.16
Elements 51.16 234.80 refresh/sec
Disk Test 24.02
Sequential 30.48
Uncached Write 36.28 22.27 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 50.76 28.72 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 21.66 6.34 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 26.46 13.30 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 19.82
Uncached Write 6.93 0.73 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 36.17 11.58 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 61.04 0.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 73.67 13.67 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 
The XBench results for my G4/1.33 iBook are:

Results 24.49
System Info
Xbench Version 1.2
System Version 10.4.4 (8G32)
Physical RAM 1024 MB
Model PowerBook6,7
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.33 GHz
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.33 GHz
Bus Frequency 134 MHz
Video Card ATY,M12
Drive Type FUJITSU MHV2060AT
CPU Test 26.65
GCD Loop 57.25 3.02 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 18.06 429.02 Mflop/sec
vecLib FFT 38.55 1.27 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 19.49 3.39 Mops/sec
Thread Test 29.31
Computation 27.87 564.64 Kops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 30.90 1.33 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 17.79
System 16.58
Allocate 54.03 198.40 Kalloc/sec
Fill 15.52 754.47 MB/sec
Copy 10.20 210.75 MB/sec
Stream 19.19
Copy 18.71 386.38 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale 18.82 388.90 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 19.26 410.33 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad 20.03 428.41 MB/sec [altivec]
Quartz Graphics Test 32.24
Line 27.70 1.84 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 27.54 8.22 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 30.51 2.49 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 41.09 1.04 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 39.12 2.45 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 23.03
Spinning Squares 23.03 29.22 frames/sec
User Interface Test 19.13
Elements 19.13 87.80 refresh/sec
Disk Test 32.02
Sequential 51.00
Uncached Write 45.75 28.09 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 45.39 25.68 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 66.92 19.58 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 51.03 25.65 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 23.33
Uncached Write 8.48 0.90 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 53.33 17.07 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 50.05 0.35 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 67.77 12.58 MB/sec [256K blocks]

All I can say is kwitcherkicken.
 
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