Mountain Lion Locking Up

I'm having an issue with 10.8.2 (well since 10.8 onwards) where the OS just locks up a couple of times a day. I can move the mouse (as the beachball), bring the dock up, but I can't actually open anything, eventaully the dock sticks in the up position and this is normally where I hold down the power button to switch off, as I can't select the usual shutdown. While this is happening I also can't bring up force quite or the activity monitor, so I'm not really sure how I go about finding out which software is to blame.

I'm also noticing a general slowness... system prefs takes anout 20secs to open up, switching between programs often brings up a beachball. I have pleantly of ram in both my mac pro (16GB) and macbook pro (8GB), but it still happens on both machines.

I use Thunderbird and sometimes this freezes a lot... but how do I go about finding if it is the issue. Some of the other programs I use are;

Adobe CS6

Coda 2

Dropbox

Skype

LittleIpsum

OpenOffice

If anyone has any suggestions on how I can figure out the issue, please let me know.

Thanks

Wayne

Posted on Nov 9, 2012 1:38 AM