Macbook help

berry

Active Member
macbook has decided to play funny buggers - it takes ages to start up and then when it does that's it. No apps will open, if i click on anything i get the spinning wheel. then it stops and I do the same thing again like groundhog day. The mac was working fine when i took it on holiday a week or so ago. any advice
 
I guess a week is long enough to get over jet-lag. I've never had this issue with my PC and this may be a mac/Apple OS issue, in which case none of my advice will be relevant. What troubleshooting steps have you taken so far?
Sounds like a piece of your hardware is failing. Did your mac undergo any extreme temperatures or have a particularly rough journey to and from your holiday location? Maybe something has come loose? How old is your mac book? Have you tried using the disk utility software? Perhaps some fragmentation has occurred. How much space left on your Hard Drive?
Checked for viruses? Do you have an equivalent of device manager where it gives you the status of each piece of hardware, maybe it will show up an error of some kind.
Let me know how you get on with it.
 
Berry,
have you tried booting in safe mode? This is sometimes a good way to force the mac to check its self over and see if you can perform a disk utility check.
Do the following and check.
  1. Be sure your Mac is shut down.
  2. Press the power button.
  3. Immediately after you hear the startup tone, hold the Shift key. The Shift key should be held as soon as possible after the startup tone, but not before the tone.
  4. Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple icon and the progress indicator (looks like a spinning gear).
 
if this was windows I'd be saying the os/start up file/driver has become corrupted or possibly even the (mft) master file table (says where file is on the hard drive) but everything I've read says a mac doesn't have the mft.
Next thing seeing as it's a laptop is the ram has been unseated. Can you open the base and 'push' the ram back in or run a ram checker on os-x
where's tim when you need him lol
 
Back up everything important and do a clean install. I know it's a pain but it'll resolve pretty much any software problem. It only takes a few hours and if you can't use it anyway you're not losing any time.
 
matt said:
Back up everything important and do a clean install. I know it's a pain but it'll resolve pretty much any software problem. It only takes a few hours and if you can't use it anyway you're not losing any time.
Completely clean install or could you get away with an archive and install?
You should have a hard wear test dvd that was part of your original documentation that might help you determine any hard wear issues.
 
You could try and archive and install first, but a clean install does what it says, leaving your Mac as if you just bought it. Of course you need to go ahead and reinstall all your software/plugins/fonts etc. but it keeps your computer healthy.
I tend to do a clean install every time I upgrade the OS, not the interstitial upgrades, the main ones. It's a good way of keeping your mac clean and efficient You'd be surprised at the amount of useless crap that accumulates over time.
 
I use to do the same but stopped doing it with the last few os versions, just got lazy I guess. I do use DiskWarrior to rebuild the hard drive every 6 months or so that seems to keep things running ok, it will be 6 years old in a few months still with the original hard drive.
 
Siorted chaps. went to Genuis Bar and it was my operationg system that had, They reinstallalled a new one, lost everything but I did have it all backed up.
cheers for the help.
 
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