IMac grinds to a halt....

Hi,
Machine - iMac 3.06. 4G ram. Plenty of space on the hard drive.
Symptoms - Runs blazing fast for several days then just slows to a crawl. Unresponsive. Beachballs.
Tries thus far - Big deep breath....
1. Wiped the internal and fresh install of OS X.
2. Repaired permissions.
3. Re-set PRAM.
4. Checked and " proved " both RAM chips.( Swapped with spares and other iMacs )
5. Checked and " proved " the hard drive. ( Drive Genius )
6. Removed and " proved " peripherals. Printers, hubs, none apple mouse etc etc. No change.
I think the problem may be heat related. The Mac is quite dusty and is used for heavy duty gaming.
Have I missed anything? Any assistance will be met with the usual amount of intense gratitude!
Regards.
Ian.

Your new hard drive has probably solved your problem, but...since you have an HP printer, here is a problem I sometimes encounter.
Every once in awhile I see a large temp increase up to about 114-118 degrees F on the CPU while using my computer. Normal temp while surfing the web is around 102F. When I check the "Activity Monitor" I notice that a process called "hpdot4d" with a user name of "root" is using up 102% of the CPU activity. I then just simply turn the printer on, then off, and the process drops off to about .2% and the temp drops like a rocket back down to normal. This happens about 2-3 times a month. When I called HP tech about it, they couldn't explain it since "hpdot4d" is just a port route.
Explain it or not...it happens occasionally and turning on and off the printer solves it.
Just thought I'd give you the info.
Best...virg

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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqQI1x9bna9xWszc8eO_L_...
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I use an ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro with dual monitors and its certainly not a top of the range card nor as SteveG suggests should it be.
> Maybe it's just me, but could you please explain how a faster drive makes a difference to the performance when zoomed in? Because on the face of it, that makes no sense.
It could have something to do with the alignment of the planets rather than the faster hard drive but all I can do is give the facts, my observations and logical conclusions :-)
Zoom in for really close work with large track count recorded at 44.1k with a 7200 rpm drive and I would have an annoying lag of about 2ish seconds enough to really disrupt workflow.
Do nothing else but add a 10k rpm drive and make that my primary work drive - problem gone.
Think about the logic of it for a minute.
You are somewhere say in the middle of the song you zoom in (I'm thinking just now while I'm typing - which is novel in itself - that Steve you may be thinking that the lag is in the zoom - its not and that could be the confusion but I'll continue) and press play. AA has to load the tracks position the file pointers of all track at the beginning of the file then move each pointer to the position in the song for each track to your zoom point and then play the tracks.
Worse for 48k files and probably worse (can't tell cause I usually have heaps of edits) with heaps of slices as each is a virtual copy of the original track.
That's a lot of work and a lot of data to move around - I'm seriosly looking at the solid state drives with lower seek times.
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bump!

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IMac grinds to a halt....

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