It Only Takes One Bad Apple To Make Me Hate Computers Even More

So, I joined the Mac cult with promises of "it just works" and "you won't have all those silly problems that Windows lusers have". I have come to the conclusion that these confident proclamations are a bunch of horse-hooey.


Don't get me wrong, I really like OSX. It is generally so much cleaner and nicer to work with than Windows, IMHO. It's more Unixy under the covers so you know I have to love it. But all this stuff about "it just works" and being able to avoid the kinds of annoyances that Windows has is, as I said, just a bunch of horse-hooey. Well, OK, maybe the annoyances aren't exactly the same, but it seems that OSX has plenty of its own.

The past couple of weeks I've been noticing that after a day or so of (relative) idle time, when I go back to my Mini it becomes quite uncooperative and unresponsive. The screensaver goes away and the desktop comes right up, but from that point on it's as if some huge CPU hungry program is running in the background. The application windows and menus become completely unresponsive. Trying to bring up a menu results in the "beach ball" (I've come to learn this is the equivalent of the Windows "hourglass"). A beach ball sounds like it would be fun, but it isn't. The system is not completely dead, but it literally takes minutes for a menu to come up. About the only reliable "cure" I've found so far is to power cycle the little beastie. When I do that, everything comes up just fine, and it will continue running great for several days, only to once again freeze up.

I've managed to pre-emptively have "top" loaded and running on a couple of occasions when this little phenomenon occurs to see if I could determine what was taking up all the CPU time. Of course, wouldn't you know it, "top" tells me that the CPU is 80-99% idle on any given refresh cycle. All the while, instead of updating every second or so, it alternates between erratically updating once every 10 or 15 seconds, to updating in a burst of once-a-second refreshes 3 or 4 times. The beach ball re-appears. It mocks me.

So I've talked to my Apple-savvy nephew and my Apple-savvy friends and co-workers and, of course, none of them have ever heard about anything remotely like this. I've done a fair bit of googling and have, at the very least, found others with symptoms that sound a lot like mine. For example: here and here. What I haven't found is any clear-cut cause or permanent solution.

What I have learned is that OSX, like Windows, has its own little annoyances and quirks. For example, I've seen recommended in several places that whenever you apply an update, or are having general "weirdness", you should to run a built in OSX utility that fixes the file permissions on system files. I'm sorry, but this is not something you should have to do on a system that is supposed to "just work". Nevertheless, I have done so, in hopes that this will make my problem go away. I won't really know for a couple of days probably, because that's how long it usually takes for this to manifest.

In case your wondering, no, I have not loaded my Mac up with all kinds of weird third party applications and questionable utility programs that would likely be fouling things up. Other than what was already installed on the system, and iLife (which came bundled), the only other applications I have installed are FireFox and Thunderbird. I do not have a bunch of applications running in the background when this occurs (confirmed by "top"!). Sometimes Firefox and/or Thunderbird are open, but not always. It's one of those weird hard-to-diagnose problems that make me thank my lucky stars that I don't work in tech support.

I will be sure to keep you, my loyal readers, posted.