[OSX-Users] Re: Snow Leopard Lock Ups

[Jules]

a) Have you upgraded to 10.6.1?
b) Have you wiped and re-indexed your spotlight index?
c) Checked your system log for disk i/o errors, as spotlight is far more 
likely to find them than you are?
d) Checked your disk's "S.M.A.R.T." status?
e) Done a verify pass of the disk?

To do (a) go to the Apple menu, choose Software Update and let it 
install the updates available.

To do (b) go to the System Preferences / Spotlight, then drag your disks 
into the "Privacy" list, wait a few seconds, then use the "-" button to 
remove them again. That will force a re-index of Snow Leopard.

To do (c) start up Applications / Utilities / Console.

To do (d) start up Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility, select your 
hard disk in the column on the left, and look in the bottom of the 
window for the "S.M.A.R.T. Status".

To do (e) start up Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility, select your 
hard disk in the column on the left, and click on the "Verify Disk" 
button towards the bottom-right corner of the window. You may need to 
boot off a Snow Leopard DVD and then run "Disk Utility" from the 
installer in order to be able to verify your internal hard disk. Boot 
off the DVD, confirm the language, then go to the menu bar and choose 
"Disk Utility" from the "Utilities" menu.

As Les has already suggested, this is far more likely to be caused by a 
damaged hard disk than a software problem.

I haven't seen any reports on the net from anyone else of 
Spotlight-related problems in Snow Leopard. So I would have to doubt 
your diagnosis.

Jules.

On 16/09/2009 09:36, Christopher Gutteridge wrote:
> That's a cute idea but I just had another lockup start. Interestingly 
> each time the first thing to lock is the top right menu.
>
> This time I killed a bunch of apps, via the terminal. The one which 
> seemed to fix it was: SystemUIServer. The lockup appeared to start 
> with "spotlight".
>
> I use VLC to listen to mp3 audio books, so utterly require a 
> placelist, and deeply dislike using iTunes for this purpose. If key 
> applications are broken in snow leopard then that bloody sucks. I'm 
> about as willing to shift to Safari as I would be if firefox started 
> crashing in Widows so I was advised to use IE.
>
> My key point in all of this is that Snow Leopard has some issues. Just 
> because they don't hit everyone doesn't mean their not there. If you 
> don't *need* Snow Leopard then it might be worth holding off rushing 
> into an upgrade.
>
>
>
>
> Daniel Thorpe wrote:
>> Chris,
>>
>> I've been running SL for quite a while now and haven't had any 
>> problems with the OS freezing, and have never been forced to restart 
>> it due to poor performance. I use Safari instead of Firefox, Mail 
>> instead of Thunderbird, and although I don't watch videos on this 
>> machine, I'd use the new Quicktime Player over VLC.  However, I do 
>> use Terminal, Xcode, Interface Builder, BBEdit, TextMate, Tweetie, 
>> Activity Monitor, iTunes, Coda, Photoshop, DataGraph, Transmit, iCal, 
>> Omnigraffle, Adium, MacTeX, BibDesk and Things all quite regularly.
>>
>> So, as a test, why not try Safari for a bit, and refrain from using 
>> Thunderbird if you can get your email from webmail, and if you 
>> install Perian, the new Quicktime Player is much more responsive than 
>> the old Quicktime Player (although I admit it still does support 
>> playlists!).  Then after a week or so, see how Snow Leopard is behaving.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Dan
>>
>> p.s. Without wanting to start a riot on the list, I would venture 
>> that the Mozilla apps aren't exactly typical "good Mac OS citizens" 
>> with their exotic build system....
>>
>>
>> On 16 Sep 2009, at 01:34, Christopher Gutteridge wrote:
>>
>>> I wish I'd not bothered to upgrade to Snow Leopard (so early). I've 
>>> noticed no improvements I give a damn about and have had to 
>>> hard-reset about once every 48 hours when it locks up.
>>>
>>> Mostly I use:
>>> Firefox 3.5.3, thunderbird, Terminal, VLC
>>>
>>> Every now and then it starts locking up. I can't tell exactly why, 
>>> but it can't start new apps, current apps start freezing, one by 
>>> one, the terminal won't execute new commands (just hangs when you 
>>> try). Eventually everything locks up and a hard-reset is the only 
>>> option.
>>>
>>> I found a list of software issues: http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/ 
>>> but none of them explain a total OS lockup. I also run dropbox and 
>>> sophos, although I don't really care about them, so it could be them 
>>> causing problems.
>>>
>>> dang. My Mac just lost the reliability which made it good. :(
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Christopher Gutteridge -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/cjg
>>>
>>> Lead Developer, EPrints Project, http://eprints.org/
>>>
>>> Web Projects Manager, University of Southampton, School of 
>>> Electronics and Computer Science
>>>
>>
>

Jules

-- 
sysjkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk