Extremely slow after reboot, reformat, Tiger-reinstall. Need new HDD?
Got the late 2006 white intel iMac 17" in feb 2007. It started a couple of weeks back from now with choppy flash video playback. So I tried removing flash plugin, reinstalling and then removing and reinstalling browsers. Did not work. So I decided to clean the apps a bit and used AppDelete or something like it to remove apps and files associated with them. Removed some widgets, parts of Adobe CS3 and other. Bad move apparently...
After an extremely long reboot everything was changed; it was as if I had 2 mb of RAM instead of my 2 GB (upgraded). I guess I had too many programs up and running at the same time, but something was wrong. Windows XP (Bootcamped) was functional but shared the problem; seemingly low RAM or extremely slow HDD. For example; I could easily play COD4 (lowest settings, but that was from before. Still topping the servers tho ;)), but switching between software was a pain.
So I formatted the mac partition and reinstalled Tiger. An install that took two full days ( ! ). This didn't solve the problem; as soon as the HDD need to write or read it freezes. Scrolling web-pages, installing software or buffering flash video takes obscene amounts of time.
Anyway, I formatted the intire drive including the "Win"-side, re-reinstalled Tiger (took me an entire week of coming home from work, inserting next disk, coming home from work the next day, finding an kernel panic (gray screen, restart text?), restarting) and here I am now. I have switched back to my initial 1 GB RAM just to see if the "new" RAM was the problem but it is still the same.
So my conclusion is that the HDD is failing. But the hardware check on the Tiger-disks came back OK. And how can the harddrive have been "damaged" from removing the wrong software and then rebooting? Or is this all just coincidence?
What should I do? I talked to the guys at the local Mac support center and they agreed on the HDD and said I should buy a new one and let them install it (for 168$, then I'd buy HDD elsewere for 100$ maybe).
Do YOU agree? Is there something I should try before putting out a lot of money? Smells like something for the warranty, but even for swedish laws it's too late (it's one year here).
After an extremely long reboot everything was changed; it was as if I had 2 mb of RAM instead of my 2 GB (upgraded). I guess I had too many programs up and running at the same time, but something was wrong. Windows XP (Bootcamped) was functional but shared the problem; seemingly low RAM or extremely slow HDD. For example; I could easily play COD4 (lowest settings, but that was from before. Still topping the servers tho ;)), but switching between software was a pain.
So I formatted the mac partition and reinstalled Tiger. An install that took two full days ( ! ). This didn't solve the problem; as soon as the HDD need to write or read it freezes. Scrolling web-pages, installing software or buffering flash video takes obscene amounts of time.
Anyway, I formatted the intire drive including the "Win"-side, re-reinstalled Tiger (took me an entire week of coming home from work, inserting next disk, coming home from work the next day, finding an kernel panic (gray screen, restart text?), restarting) and here I am now. I have switched back to my initial 1 GB RAM just to see if the "new" RAM was the problem but it is still the same.
So my conclusion is that the HDD is failing. But the hardware check on the Tiger-disks came back OK. And how can the harddrive have been "damaged" from removing the wrong software and then rebooting? Or is this all just coincidence?
What should I do? I talked to the guys at the local Mac support center and they agreed on the HDD and said I should buy a new one and let them install it (for 168$, then I'd buy HDD elsewere for 100$ maybe).
Do YOU agree? Is there something I should try before putting out a lot of money? Smells like something for the warranty, but even for swedish laws it's too late (it's one year here).
Late 2006 (white) Intel iMac 17", Mac OS X (10.4.7), RAM 1GB->2GB, warranty is out