Restart vs Shutdown then Reboot?

A restart and a cold boot are, for the most part, the same. Caches are cleared and the entire OS is 'reset' for lack of a better term. What you did should help, but a full 'reset' is required some times.

May I suggest you post the EtreCheck output for analysis

<https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6174>

(My biggest fear is that her OEM HD is growing weary, hence the recurring pauses while it looks for the info it needs to continue.)

That is always possible, but it could be software that has been installed as well.

You might also want to look at the Applications -> Utilities - Console and see if there are log entries that are being add very rapidly, as in a process is starting, dying, starting, dying, starting, .... This kind of activity will not easily show up in Activity Monitor

Speaking of Activity Monitor, you may want to run Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor to see if there are any processes that using too much CPU or memory.

It is possible you are exceeding your RAM so much that a lot of time is being spent paging to disk causing apps to wait while essential code or data is paged back into memory before it can continue. You can run Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal -> sar -g 60 100

This will display the pageout activity once a minute for 100 minutes (adjust the numbers to suite your tastes). If you are getting zeros, then no paging. If you are getting an occasional blip, do not worry about it, unless it goes hand in hand with a beachball event. If there is a consistent stream of pageouts, especially high numbers, then you have a paging problem.

Zinio Delivery Manager UNKNOWN (missing value)

Do you know what this is? When I Google it, I am not finding nice things being said.

I am seeing some references to it being a cleaning app on the Mac. Long time forum contributors have found that Mac cleaning apps cause more trouble than they are worth. Along with any anti-virus apps, and memory cleaner apps. We find user systems run better without any of these 3rd party apps.

If you do know what is it, and if it is performing a service you value, then OK. Otherwise, I suggest you consider removing it.

<http://www.securitystronghold.com/gates/zinio-delivery-manager.html>

Time Machine information requires OS X 10.8 "Moutain Lion" or later

This is most likely just EtreCheck saying it does not know how to get Time Machine detailed information on a version of OS X before Mountain Lion. I do not think EtreCheck is saying anything bad about your Time Machine backup setup. I'm assuming you have backups happening, if not via Time Machine, then via some other backup utility/service.

I am not seeing anything else of interest on your system.

You might try booting into Safe mode as an experiment

<http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1564>

Safe mode will not load 3rd party additions and see if there is a significant difference. You do not want to run full time in Safe mode, but it is a good experiment to see if 3rd party stuff is causing issues.

You might try the Terminal -> sar -g ... experiment above, letting it run to see if you are experiencing any paging/swapping issues. I suspect not, as you have 8GB of RAM and unless you are doing large format photo editing or video editing, you are most likely not going to over stress your RAM.

Granted, you system was up less than an hour when you ran EtreCheck. The EtreCheck output might have more information if it was run at the time you are seeing your system performance issues.

By the way, you can just copy and paste the EtreCheck output directly into a reply. You do not need to print to PDF, and post on Dropbox. But if you like that better it is OK too.

Finally, if you do decide you are going to replace the disk yet again (and I do not see any reason it is the disk), then consider an SSD. It will put "Spring" in your Mac mini's step 😁 But seriously, do not spend money on something that you may not need.

sp_clark wrote:

Only suspicious item I noted is Time Machine requiring 10.8? Why then would it even be included in 10.6.8's installer? Anyway, I deleted it & found no change after restart.

Hello sp_clark,

That note says that EtreCheck cannot obtain Time Machine information unless you are running 10.8 or later. So, what exactly did you delete? You should never, ever delete any system file. If you deleted Time Machine, then you will need to reinstall the operating system. Repairing the hard disk using Disk Utility might be a good idea too.

However, there is nothing out of the ordinary about your EtreCheck report. It is best to run EtreCheck before restarting because restarting will erase evidence of certain problems. It sounds like the hard drive may be failing. Those machines use 2.5" notebook hard drives and those tend to fail after 2-3 years. Before SSDs became affordable I used to replace my hard drives every 2 years whether they needed it or not.

You do not need to do any kind of routine maintenance on your system.

Frequent spinning beach balls and no paging activity may indicate the rotating boot disk is starting to deal with a lot of error recovery issues. Just a thought.

Wild thought. Could it be a bad SATA cable?

Worked well as external. But fails as internal. Could be bad SATA cable. Could be something bad on the motherboard specific to the internal disk.

I mentioned the SATA cable, because I have seen a few posts (not many) that were solved by replacing that cable. I would have never thought of it, but someone else did and I thought they were crazy to suggest the cable, but a few days later the user came back and said it solved their problem. So I figured I would toss it to you.

Also since you seem to be having similar problems with 2 different disks, I was looking for something in common. And the engineer in me says that the motherboard SATA controller is also in common, but that is not as easy to change as a cable 🙂

Maybe Genius Bar appointment to have they run their diagnostics.