Repaired a friends old slow mac, reinstalled OS, still getting spinning beach ball for everything, and very slow

Question

Repaired a friends old slow mac, reinstalled OS, still getting spinning beach ball for everything, and very slow

Hi All,

A friend gave me what he thought to be a broken down computer. It's the macbook 2010 model. The bottom peeled off pretty much, screen was cracked, and the keyboard too. I took it in and got all those things repaired. Then I wiped the hard drive and reinstalled snow leopard. I updated to the newest release (10.6.8). I installed a few applications (reason, ableton live). Other than that everything is new.

The problem: It's really slow. Just as slow when he had it before I took it in. I checked with disk utility to see if the hard drive was ok, and it is verified and all. It has 2 gigs of ram. 2.66 intel core 2 duo i think, but i might be wrong (don't have it in front of me).

So basic functions take a while. Clicking on airport at the top take a while to load. Applications are slow, and navigating finder is slow. Sometimes it runs okay for a while, but will also end up freezing sometimes and I'll have to restart completely. I tried booting into safe mode but I don't think that did anything.

This computer has been through a lot. It went on a mission trip to africa, and got treated pretty poorly. Could it simply be that I need to install a new hard drive, and install the OS on that? Or could it be that the processor is just fried?

What can I do to figure out what the problem is? I tried downloading linux ubuntu to boot from a usb so that I could see if that was faster (and deduce that the hard drive was the problem?) but i couldn't get it to work.

Anyways, any suggestions, or help would be greatly appreciated. Now that I've gotten it fixed up aesthetically, I would love to get it up and running.

Thanks

Posted on Mar 3, 2012 4:47 PM

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Answer 1

BGreg

Level 6

17,558 points

Mar 3, 2012 6:09 PM in response to torsenstarrow

You might download SMART Utility from http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php to look at the hardware condition of the hard drive.

Also, see these FAQ:

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/performance.html

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Answer 2

Mar 3, 2012 6:44 PM in response to BGreg

Thanks! I did give that shot, and it said it was ok. I'll do it again though. Is there a similar tools for checking on the processor / ram / other stuff?

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Answer 3

Mar 3, 2012 7:08 PM in response to BGreg

nvm, i must have been using a different program because this one says my drive is FAILING. lol. Looks like i'm getting a new hard drive.

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Answer 4

BGreg

Level 6

17,558 points

Mar 3, 2012 7:11 PM in response to torsenstarrow

If you have the original OS X disks, you can use the Apple hardware test. Or TechTool Deluxe or TechTool Pro can do similar testing.

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Answer 5

Mar 3, 2012 7:16 PM in response to BGreg

cool. Well i can't seem to find anything else that's the problem, so i'm going to get a new drive. Thanks for your help!

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Answer 6

BGreg

Level 6

17,558 points

Mar 3, 2012 7:23 PM in response to torsenstarrow

For a replacement drive, I like the Western Digital Scorpio black 2.5" SATA drives, as they have a 5 year warranty. I like http://www.newegg.com, which has lots of user reviews.

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Answer 7

Mar 3, 2012 7:28 PM in response to torsenstarrow

SMART status says your drive is failing when it gets a few Bad Blocks. That can be a bad drive, or it can be just a few Bad Blocks. If you like to tinker, you should Zero the drive and see if it passes.

It may last a good long time after that... or it could fail tomorrow. Drives are very reliable over a very large sample, but any individual drive could fail at any time.

Use Disk Utility and Erase, then choose security options -- Zero out data, one pass. It takes several hours.

It may fail, which means over 10 Bad Blocks. Then you could run it again, but you should probably replace the drive.

It may pass, at which point it has substituted spare (reserve) blocks and is now 100 percent good bocks again. But it has a history.

If it passes, some users also suggest it would make a good drive for backup (cloning) onto, which is fairly light duty.

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Answer 8

Mar 3, 2012 7:40 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thanks Grant, I didn't know that I could have done a more thorough format. I'll try to "zero" the drive and then reinstall the OS.

Thanks again!

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Answer 9

Mar 3, 2012 7:57 PM in response to torsenstarrow

Technically speaking, it is not a reformat. Most drives today have the formatting applied at the factory, and never in the field.

What you are doing is forcing each data block to contain known good data. As you do this, the drive will substitute spares for any that are not good immediately after being written with Zeroes. Drives write the data semi-redundantly, and the drive controller knows when a read correction has occurred, and whether it was successful or not.

Hard drives have essentially always had these spare blocks held in reserve, both to cover minor manufacturing defects and to make field substitutions. The substitution is made by the drive controller, which adds the bad block's block number to the defect list and substitutes a spare to be used in place of the defective block.

The dilemma has always been, "how bad is bad enough?" Apple's threshold for a deadly number of Bad Blocks has been 10. It is possible for a drive to develop a few Bad Blocks, then be fine for a long time. It is also possible for a drive to have a few Bad Blocks, then get a few more, and a few more, and go downhill and die.

Most users today do not want to deal with this issue at all, ever. When drives used to cost US$1000 for 240 MegaBytes, they were not exactly "disposable".

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Answer 10

Mar 4, 2012 6:50 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

well... i zeroed the drive, and reinstalled snow leopard. still VERY slow. the SMART program said the drive is failing still. I'm going to buy a new drive and install it today I think.

Any other thoughts?

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Answer 11

Mar 4, 2012 8:08 AM in response to torsenstarrow

the SMART program said the drive is failing still

Then it IS failing still. Discard it.

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