Mac Mini Weirdness

[benos]

Today, BigJoni's Mac Mini (10.5.8) went into slow motion - approximately a 5 second delay before completing any operation - opening a window, typing a letter, etc. Did a restart, and it froze duing startup, right after the background pic loaded. She did a force shutdown (held down the power key for 5 seconds), then when she tried to start it again it appeared to be dead (no response). (I was on the phone the whole time.)

It was lunch time, so I unplugged all the cables from the computer and unplugged the computer and the monitor, and we ate lunch. Came back and plugged in all the cables and plugged in the power cords (in the opposite plugs they were in in the UPS). And it started up fine.

I backed up everything that might have been changed since last evening's backup, ran a fsck -yf, and the drive "appeared to be okay." So far it seems to be working fine.

Weird.

be

[BritinUSA]

If it happens again, try launching the activity viewer to see what the system is doing. If its paging memory in and out then there may be an issue the the onboard memory chips.

[benos]

If it happens again, try launching the activity viewer to see what the system is doing. If its paging memory in and out then there may be an issue the the onboard memory chips.

Thanks Paul! I had forgotten about the activity monitor.

Where in the activity monitor would you see that it is "paging memory"? I'm not that familiar with that app.

be

[BritinUSA]

Click on System Memory. it will show the Page-Ins along with some other stuff. It may be a good idea to check it while the computer is working normally and then run it again when you are having the problem. This may indicate the source of the problem.

[Classic_jon]

BritinUSA is probably correct but, on the outside chance I have seen a couple PC's do something similar and it is a possibility that the capacitors on the power supply or the motherboard may be having issues.

If is does it again and unplugging the system "fixes it" I would say to take it to the Apple store and have them run a memorytest on it or you can download memtest http://www.memtest86.com/ and run it for a while and see if it comes back with good RAM memory. If the memory test comes back as good then it is probably the motherboard or the power-supply doing something hokey and you will definitely want to have the Apple people look it over.

The reason I suggest this is that you did exactly what I would have suggested by unplugging it and letting it sit. What that does is force everything in the system to discharge any residual charge that could be causing an issue.

[benos]

Thanks guys!

Paul,

I just opened the Activity Monitor (in my machine, Tiger), and for Page-In's/Page out's, it had: 45459/0

So is that how it's supposed to look when it's all good?

So then I opened the AM in BigJoni's machine (Leopard) and the Page in's are displayed differently. It just reads:

Page In's: 701 MB

And BigJoni's machine has worked fine all day.

?

be

[BritinUSA]

I have 2Gb memory(RAM) and Pagins are 128Mb... That number should rise the longer the machine is active. You can sort the application list by clicking the column headings. I suspect that when the lockout occurs there may be something either munching all the CPU or the MEMORY which will lead you to the root cause of the problem.