G5 10.4.11 iMac running amok

In article <081220071151461299%philip@alumni.rutgers.edu>,
Phil Stripling <philip RemoveThis @alumni.rutgers.edu> wrote:

> My wife is using a G5 iMac with 10.4.11, and it occasionally runs amok
> on her - apparently rampant disk access (lots of staticy, grinding
> noises from within the case) at random times, with long bouts of
> beacballspinning going on. My guess is that it's sending RAM to disk,
> but what do I know. She can't connect the times it does this to
> anything in particular. She's mostly surfing.
>
> Is this a commonly known issue or is there something more I need to
> find out to find out what the problem is?

Frequent, lengthy disk read-write could be caused by various things.

Might be caused by not enough RAM, or by lots of processes running in
the background using up RAM, or by severely fragmented files, or not
much free disk space. Might be other causes as well.

More RAM generally helps performance. My MacBook running 10.4.11 has 2
GB RAM. Came with 1 GB installed, which I upped to 2 GB, which made a
real improvement in performance.

You can check for RAM usage, disk usage, disk activity, CPU activity and
Network activity by opening the Activity Monitor. Find that in
Applications >> Utilities >> Activity Monitor. Useful for diagnosing
performance problems generally, and may point the way to things you can
do to improve performance.

If RAM usage by background processes is a problem, try quitting
applications not needed at the moment.

If there is not much free disk space, the disk has to do a lot of
spinning to write new data to open space, and to find data. I have read
that it is a good idea to limit disk usage to something like 75% of
total capacity. If you are appreciably above that maybe you need to put
in a larger disk.

I think that Web surfing saves a lot of stuff to cache files on the
disk. The purpose of this is to allow rapid retrieval of previously
visited web pages. If those pages have a lot of content, such as large
pictures, etc, that could cause a lot of disk activity. I don't know how
you can change this behavior.

--
Bill Collins
For email, change "fake" to "earthlink"
 >> Stay informed about: G5 10.4.11 iMac running amok 

In article <081220071151461299%philip@alumni.rutgers.edu>,
Phil Stripling <philip DeleteThis @alumni.rutgers.edu> wrote:

> My wife is using a G5 iMac with 10.4.11, and it occasionally runs amok
> on her - apparently rampant disk access (lots of staticy, grinding
> noises from within the case) at random times, with long bouts of
> beacballspinning going on. My guess is that it's sending RAM to disk,
> but what do I know. She can't connect the times it does this to
> anything in particular. She's mostly surfing.
>
> Is this a commonly known issue or is there something more I need to
> find out to find out what the problem is?

This won't be much help in solving your problem, but might give you the
assurance that there's probably not something basically wrong with the
computer software combination. I'm running Mac OS X.4.11 on an iSight
iMac G5, 2.1 gig with 1.5 gigbytes of memory. X.4.10 gave me a number
of niggling little problems that have been completely cleaned up with
the X.4.11 upgrade. This computer is running better than it ever has,
which is going a long way toward motivating me not to upgrade to Leo any
time soon.

Best of luck in sorting out your problem.
 >> Stay informed about: G5 10.4.11 iMac running amok