A number of issues, should I be concerned?

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Level 1

4 points

A number of issues, should I be concerned?

My IMac is 2.16GHZ Duel Core, with 2GB of RAM, 250 GB HD with 20 Gigs available. I know I'm approaching capacity but need to know if I should be concerned with some to the issues I'm having?

1. When it wakes up, it will boot up but after about 10 seconds go back to sleep. When I wake it the second time it remains on.

2. Lately when using Safari it will freeze and require a force quit. When I try to start Safari again it will not open. Also happens occasionally with my e-mail. The only way to get it to open is by restarting, which is another issue.

3. When I try to restart after the problems I listed in #2 it will shut down all apps but freeze when the desk top icons clear except for the image I use for the desk top. I then have to unplug and reboot.

4. Rebooting either by restart or after shut down is VERY SLOW. It makes no difference if it's just a normal reboot or one after one of the problems I listed. I timed it today to see how long it takes.... 1 min 45 sec from reboot till blue screen, over 5 minutes before all apps are open.

Is it time to start thinking of bigger machine?

Thanks

G5, Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Feb 3, 2011 1:52 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 3, 2011 2:01 PM in response to Fir Na Tine

Hi,

250 GB HD with 20 Gigs available.

Considering the problems you have metnioned, I think you would benefit from freeing up disk space. Right or control click the MacintoshHD icon. Click Get Info. In the Get Info window you will see Capacity and Available. *Make sure you always have a minimum of 15% free disk space.*

Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk

Carolyn 🙂

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Answer 2

rkaufmann87

Level 10

140,376 points

Feb 3, 2011 2:01 PM in response to Fir Na Tine

I think one issue you are having is not having enough HD space available. Macs need 10 - 15% of the HD available to run well, currently you are at 8%. I suspect if you offloaded some of your data that takes up lots of space your performance may return. The items that tend to take up the most space are photos, music & video and can be easily moved to an external HD. Once you have done so it's another simple matter to tell the applications (iTunes, iPhoto etc..) where the libraries are.

That is where I'd start at least.

Roger

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Answer 3

Fir Na Tine Author

Level 1

4 points

Feb 3, 2011 4:37 PM in response to rkaufmann87

Thanks Carolyn and Roger, I deleted about 5,000 photos I had in the IPhoto trash which freed up 15 gigs. This brings me to 15% available space but it still very slow to boot. This time it took 6 minutes.
I plan to delete more items to free up more space but there was absolutely no improvement.

Frank

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Answer 4

rkaufmann87

Level 10

140,376 points

Feb 3, 2011 4:52 PM in response to Fir Na Tine

Remember 15% is a bare minimum. You can try some other measures such as booting in Safe Mode, this will clear out some caches that may have become corrupted. And you can also run Apple Hardware Test to see if it detects any hardware issues. Follow the links in this post and you will find the instructions for each.

Also don't forget to empty your Trash, that could be taking up quite a bit of space if you haven't emptied it recently!

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Answer 5

mfrankkk

Level 1

7 points

Feb 3, 2011 8:50 PM in response to Fir Na Tine

Sounds like you need to go into disk utility and repair disk permissions. I had the same problem and this worked very nicely.

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