Topic: Help!! I have a computer problem :(

[decoyman]

Hey, congrats! Computer issues are super frustrating (see below ). But I have to say... it sounds like you didn't really fix the problem so much as just get a whole new computer

Last week I had a computer problem of my own... Yes, I ran into the dreaded Macbook Pro battery issue. The one where the battery starts swelling to the point that it can't get a connection to the pins anymore, and basically just doesn't work. You have to use AC power. Apparently, it's happened with certain early-model MBPs (which mine is), so they replaced it for free. Good customer service on that – they overnighted it to me with a pre-paid label so I could ship back my faulty one.

However, I've run into another problem that may very well be my own fault. My computer used to take ~35 seconds from the moment I hit the power button till the OS had finished starting up (things stopped loading and it was no longer accessing the disk or running the processor actively). NOW, it takes 3x as long, and sometimes longer, up to ~2-3 minutes. To me... that ain't normal.

I've heard that two of the things that slow a computer down the most are: 1) Anti-virus software and 2) having too many fonts loaded. Ok, so #1 is basically a non-issue for a Mac. However, I DO have like 2000 fonts (I'm a designer), and I haven't dished out the cash for a font management program.

So, do you guys think that the fonts are causing this massive increase in start-up time? It zips right through the gray screen, then the blue screen with the progress bar in no time flat, but when it gets to the desktop, that's when it starts slowing WAY down. Here's some other (perhaps not so) random info for trouble-shooting...

• I'm on a wireless network.
• When it gets to the desktop, just the upper right part of the top menu bar (so you can see the blue search icon) loads at first, followed by the rest after a long wait... I don't remember it ever loading that way before I started having this problem.
• When typing (in either a browser, Word/Pages, etc.), I easily get ahead of the text being displayed. I'm a pretty fast typist, but it never used to do that.
• I've recently repaired my permissions and scanned my drive for errors. There were many permissions needing to be fixed, and the drive passed w/ no errors, but it hasn't helped as much as I'd hoped it would.
• My hard drive has about 35GB free. The drive is 100GB.
• 2GB of RAM, 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo processor.
• Do I need to defrag? If so, can I do that on OSX (without resorting to a third-party program)?

Please help if you can... If anyone has any design-related questions, I'll try to reciprocate

[Ceric]

OSX by default will defrag the hard drive when a program is installed.  I think it will also do it when it thinks it needs it.  I found that odd when I first saw it.  I'm thinking you have the same thing happening to you that a lot of Windows user have as well.  Lots of programs starting up from the get go.  My OSXese is not what it use to be so I can't tell you where to check but I know their is a place.  Smash would probably know.   Their should either be a config file or a setting somewhere that lists everything that runs on startup.  You need to trim down what you don't need.

[UERD]

Is your hard drive light spastically blinking/continuously lit when the computer is acting slow? (Do Macs have that light? I can't remember. If not, can you hear the hard drive grinding away?)

[decoyman]

Ceric: Huh, that's cool about the defragging, I didn't know that. I only have iTunes and Firefox open on start up, so I doubt it's that. It's no different than it's been since before I started noticing the problem. (btw, one way you can check which programs are starting up is by right-clicking their icons on the dock: there's a little option you can check or uncheck there. There's also one under your account in system preferences.)

UERD: Nope, no hard drive light. I don't remember ever hearing the drive making much noise at all.

I think I'll be ordering the font management utility today. Hopefully it'll be here by the end of the week, and I'll update to say whether it helped or not...

[BlackNMild2k1]

I thought mine was fixed, but it still freezes randomly when trying to load certain webpages.
but my computer sure does run a helluva lot faster, so that atleast makes it somewhat better than before.

Do you think it could be a ram issue?
Should I purchase 2GB of faster RAM?
Could it be a Motherboard issue like I thought it was last time?
I really don't want to swap out the motherboard again, but if I traded it for the exazct same motherboard, would I have to reinstall everything again?

[Stogi]

***************HELP PLEASE********************

I'm trying to install XP Pro onto a computer. This is a Dell Studio 1737 and it use to have Windows Vista on it. Now I've done this sort of thing before, but this time I keep getting the same error message relating to the harddrive.

So let me tell you what I did (and normally do). I used Ultimate Boot Disk and inside, loaded a program called "Cute Partition Manager". I used this program to delete and create new partitions of a 250 GB drive. I made two partitions - one is 25 GB, the other 225 GB and made them both NTFS.

Then, I booted my XP Pro CD, but after awhile of loading, I get this error: STOP 0x0000007B (...., 0xC0000034, ...., ....)

After doing a bit of Googling I found out that my error message might have to do with my harddrive drivers not being up to date. But that's bullshit since it was just working before I deleted everything. So now I'm not sure what to do....I'm thinking maybe this computer can't install XP for some odd reason.

Actually, I'm in the process of downloading Vista (not illegally...from my university), just to see if this is the case. If I can get past this error with a vista disc, then maybe I was right. However, the whole point was to go back to XP pro because it's a hell of alot better.

So any ideas?

[ShyGuy]

Go into the BIOS and see if you can disable AHCI Mode on the hard drive controller.

[Stogi]

Hmm...ok...

I changed it to IDE. Let's see if that works.

EDIT: Worked like a charm. Thank you.

[ShyGuy]

Like a Boss!