On Jul 20, 2011, at 12:09 PM, Nora Probasco <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have an odd situation with my Mac. In the past couple of days it has been > running VERY slow. I know that usually means that I need to fix permissions. I know I've pontificated about this before, but I'll say it again: What's the big deal about repairing permissions? Permission problems manifest themselves in symptoms like 'file not found' or 'unable to write file' errors. A bad permission will usually only affect individual programs and not the whole machine. Besides, permission problems should actually be pretty rare. If they do crop up, they'e a symptom of deeper problems. Since Apple gave the 'Repair Permissions' hammer, too many people think every problem is a nail. My first thought is that there is a runaway background process that's eating up your processor cycles or causing lots of paging to your hard drive. It could also be memory, but that usually gives crashes. You should also unplug all peripherals except the mouse and keyboard because a faulty USB device can use up a lot of CPU cycles in the background, if its driver keeps waking up to spurious poking. To see if there's a runaway process, open Activity Monitor and sort the list of processes by CPU usage. If there's something there taking up more than 30% or so of your processor, then you've probably found the problem. While you're there, take a look at how much memory the processes are taking up because a runaway process can also slow the machine down by using so much memory that there's constant paging to the hard drive. _______________________________________________ MacGroup mailing list [email protected] http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup
