Macbook Slowing Down, Finder Often Frozen

[cgm707]

I have a MacBook Pro, running Lion. My laptop seems to have slowed down in terms of opening programs, and often, Finder will get stuck with the spinning ball. I also have an external hard drive attached to the laptop, and accessing the external often brings up the spinning ball.

The external drive has a capacity of 299.72 GB and 191.97 GB is how much is free.

For the laptop, the numbers are 249.07 GB capacity and 184.34 GB free.

I regularly run the Disk Utility to check/repair permissions.

Is there any way to determine why things are running slow, and/or if I need a new external drive?

Thanks for any help!

[trevor]

Quote: I regularly run the Disk Utility to check/repair permissions.

There's not much to go on here, but instead of Repair Disk Permissions, try Repair Disk. You will have to boot to your OS X Install disc to be able to run it on your internal drive.



Also, check your logs using the Console app, found in /Applications/Utilities. If you see anything suspicious happening in the logs recently let us know. If you can, attach your system.log here for us to see.

Also, try the things in the Generic OS X troubleshooting list.

Trevor

[cgm707]

I have done Repair Disk. I am not sure what to look for in the logs, or which logs. I will try the generic OS troubleshooting list.

[anthlover]

1) Start by disconnecting the external and see if the issue presents with only the internal drive (drag the drive icon over the trash, and wait for the eject icon appear, then disconnect).

2) Monitor performance for however long to be sure as to whether your still having a problem with out the external.

3) If your still having a problem I suspect your primary issue an impending drive failure

*** If you do not do back ups you should start. One should always have many back ups, preferably to multiple separate physical disks and to offsite like crashplan. The importance of each person's data is unique.

4) If it turns out the problems only occur when the external is connected that drive may be going bad or you may have a bad USB or FW cable. In the case of FW the controller if not oxford can be the issue and you might be better off using a USB connection if available.

We can help more when you give us more info. Which Macbook Pro? What kind of External drive, what kind of cables, etc. Going to the Apple about this mac and more info you can get info like Macbook Pro 3,2. You can also tell us what year, etc.

How did you install Lion? Upgrade? From Scratch? When did the problem begin? Do you have lots of old software? 3 party Util, etc.

You should still Do Repair Disk and Disk Permission. Did you do them on the Internal or External or both. What did it say it fixed?

If you had a bootable back up you could run the repairs booted off that disk, which usually is better.