MacBook Pro and latest Leopard

Question

Hello,
I'm running a MacBook Pro 2.33 Intel Core 2 Duo. Hitachi 200G/7200 HD and 3Gb RAM. System Leopard 10.5.2. Latest firmware installed. Latest TechTool Pro installed in the form of eDrive. All hardware shown to be in A1 condition - all tests passed. All volumes and files passed. Directory sorted out and hard drive fully optimised.
After startup everything works fine, system fairly zippy. Photoshop opens with a large tiff file in about 50 seconds and closes down instantaneously - no problems. All large and small programmes open immediately with instantaneous response to commands.
But slowly and surely it's like someone is slowly pouring glue into the system. I stop work for a while and computer goes to sleep after 15 minutes.
After which Disk Utility takes at least 5 minutes to open - interminable beach ball before any response to commands. Finder menus stuck open and wont respond etc. PhotoShop takes interminable time to open. After another sleep the screen image it went to sleep on (which was a PS tiff), opens up but is completely unresponsive to mouse or keyboard, and the only screen movement is the interminable rolling beach ball. Can't restart or force quit. Can't open Activity Monitor, so have to close down computer.
After restarting everything works fine again - then the slowing down cycle repeats itself. And so it goes on - ad nauseum - the worst system performance in all my experience with Macs, from early power Macs running 8.6.
Any clues from fellow users? thanks....BC

Answer 1

I've seen no such problem on either my two MBPs, MB, or Mac Pro. So, I would suggest you need to look at your system for the culprit rather than the computer itself or Leopard specifically.
From what you describe you may have something running that starts eating CPU time or RAM. Even with 3 GBs of RAM one can still run too many programs concurrently. So, use Activity Monitor to watch what processes are using CPU time and keep an eye out on Available RAM (Free RAM + Inactive RAM,) and monitor Pageouts. For the latter you want to use "top" in the Terminal rather than Activity Monitor because you want to look at the PageOuts(n) number in parentheses rather than just total Pageouts.
Do maintenance as well:
Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.0 is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.6.1 is Leopard compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. The current version, 1.5.1, is Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline. Note that presently AppleJack is not compatible with Leopard.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. PsynchX 2.1.1 and RsyncX 2.1 (Freeware)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - 3.0 is a Universal Binary)
7. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
8. Data Backup (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com.