# Help needed troubleshooting unstable Mac-mini



## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

So, I'm trying to find out what's going on with a PowerPC-based Mac-mini I support. It's got OS X Tiger (the latest, updated version) installed and it has 512MB of RAM and a 60GB HDD (I believe).

The machine is VERY SLUGGISH when it wasn't always this way. Here is system memory information from the Activity monitor:

Wired: 54.87
Active: 106.99
Inactive: 186.48
Used: 348.30
Free: 163.70
VM Size: 4.29GB
Page ins/outs: 200076/0

This was with four applications running, a specialized app called "MacPractice", Safari 3.2 (I believe), Finder, and the Activity Monitor itself.

When we tried to open Safari, we got the spinning color wheel. Then when Safari loaded, it took a while for the home page to appear. Then, when we tried to open Finder, we got the spinning color wheel again and it took a while (a few seconds) for the Finder window to open.

From what little I understand about interpreting the Activity Monitor numbers above, it doesn't seem as though the system is really low on RAM or anything as the amount of free RAM is good and the Inactive RAM will be used as needed.

Any idea on why we would get the spinning color wheel so frequently when starting an application?

As for this Mac being unstable, it hangs more often than it really should and we're using the power button to force it off manually to deal with hung apps since we can't always get them to force quit. We don't have an Apple keyboard connected to the system and have a USB US 101-key keyboard connected to it. So, we've been using Ctrl-Alt-ESC Ctrl-Alt-Shift-ESC to force quit a hung app with no luck. I got those key sequences from this site.

Thanks!

Peace...


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## Headrush (Feb 9, 2005)

How full is the HD?
How many apps are set to autostart? (Look in System Preferences -> Accounts -> Login Items (for that user)

By chance is Spotlight re-indexing the HD?


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

Thanks for the reply. The HDD is actually about 50% full. I started a thread on the macosx.com forum and got some useful info there. It looks like renaming the /Library/Cache file and rebooting might help some.

Peace...


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