First, open disk utility in the Applications/utilities, and repair permissions. Restart. Kill Sophos scanning program files, this may slow down your computer. You only want to have one AV program or nothing at all. If your disk need repair, this is never something to disregard. Onyx does a SMART check and if you ever fail, it could be a failing hard drive (Jimmy Greystone could throw in his opinion on this). If the computer passes SMART check, chances are this is just software. If you have a bootable disk beside your main one (everyone should have it), like external, boot from it, open Disk Utility again, highlight your main drive and click on "repair disk". Hopefully, it would do it and things would get normal. If it registers directory problem that it cannot deal with, you may need to buy Disk Warrior, a very useful and fairly trouble-free utility that can rebuild the directory. It should also be run either from an external drive or from its DVD. Hope this helps and tell us how it goes.
Another simple thing you might like to do is to create another administrative account and upon boot log into it. If the problems disappear, this would mean this is not a system-wide issue and may be fairly easy to deal with.
Hi, all. I'm Chuck, a 51 y/o DV in Ok. I've got health issues and largely confined to the house, though I sometimes substitute-teach (high school) and try to run a little graphic design / copywriting business from my home. (Wife's a high school teacher.)
I'm running a 1st-gen Mac pro quad 266 with 4GB RAM, two 500GB hard drives (one for programs, one for files), one 250GB HD for music/iTunes, and a 1TB external backup. Two Pioneer dvdr/cdr drives, two monitors (one CRT, one LCD), Logitech mouse.
I'm running OSX 10.5.8, with the latest Firefox (including SpeedyFox), also running IPSec, ClamXav and Sophos as well as SMC FanDrive to keep things cool. Programs include Toast 10, Adobe CS3, MS Office 2011 for Mac, and 'the usual assortment' of tweak, AV and security stuff.
I need some hand-holding here, and I don't know if these problems are related, but please help if you can.
I've pared down and/or stopped all the 'fancy' items (graphics, etc) that I don't need, don't use Dashboard or any of that, empty trash, etc regularly, etc.etc.etc.
Or maybe not...?
Over a year ago, I somehow lost the ability to boot up in SUM and run AppleJack, as I had monthly before that. Now, if I hit cmd-s, I stay stuck on the gray Apple screen for five minutes while the unit waits to finish booting. After that, it's ok.
I run my unit in Admin mode exclusively, and have all non-essential languages and modes either turned off or deleted.
I've run OnyX and it helps, but that persistent message it still gives out about the disk needing repair still drives me nuts, though I disregard it now.
Regarding the Gray Screen staying up forever, I tried zapping my PRAM / NVRAM (never having done it before), and was stuck on the gray screen even after holding down the four keys for a full five minutes waiting for that *$^%^!!! second 'bong' tone that never came. I gave up and let go, even though the little 'water wheel' spun on for 3-4 more minutes.
Thirdly, my Firefox tends to run slow, and gives me the SBBOD frequently when opening new tabs or switching between them. I do run quite a few add-ons for security, pop-ups and WOT, etc, so I know that might be an issue, but does anyone have a better idea? Safari still kinda sux, even though more sites work better on it than FF.
Finally, I get a LOT of crashing in my use of Toast 10, sometimes in the Encode phase, sometimes in the Write phase. I send the error messages (which mention a kernel panic somewhere), and sometimes the problem abates, sometimes not.
Any of this stuff related? Can anyone help an old vet who can't keep up? (hahaha).
If you want to email me directly with more detailed answers, I will gladly welcome your help.
C

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