Mac Mini :: What Is Best Use Of It - Tower Is Freezing And Running Slow?
Jul 3, 2012
What is the best use/purpose for the Mac Mini? My wife's G4 (Granite) Tower is ancient and slow and freezes up frequently so it's time to get another computer. I have a 5 year old MacBook Pro sitting unused after I bought a 2.13GHz MacBook Air . I am contemplating buying a Mac Mini or an 11 inch AirBook. The Macbook Air would give some flexibility to the household by being portable. She does only basic stuff, nothing fancy, so anything will be better than what she's using now. (At some point in the future, I may give my son the Airbook for college and get a new one for me, but that's not what I want to do now.)So my question to the community would be what do you recommend?
1) Reformat and use the 5 year old MacBook Pro (free)
2) Mac Mini? ($599) (I have an external monitor, keyboard and an external Mac Disk Drive so no need to buy them.)
3) MacBookAir 11 inch ($1100)
4) iMac ($1200) (I think this is overkill for her.)
My trusty G5 dual tower 1.8 is competent, but slow for HD video rendering. Would the new Mini be a significant upgrade for me? I have a great monitor and keyboard already. I can't see much difference between the Mini and standard Imac, beside the slower internal drive. If I use an external firewire drive for capturing, would this no longer be an issue?
I bought my MBP two years ago (late 08 version) and its been really slow to the point where I just got so frustrated I bought an IMac. But now I'm going to be traveling for a couple of weeks and I need my MBP with me. Is there a way to stop this slowness? It like freezes sometimes when I open a file and safari is just unbearable! Should I reinstall OS?
my mid-2010 w/lion is running quite slow and hanging: sometimes freezing. have reset smc and emptied caches. helped for a bit but now even slower. happens with minimal load on cpu and have plenty of memory available.
Info: MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2010), Mac OS X (10.7.4)
Over the past month Lion has been crashing, running slow and freezing constantly.\ I am not used to having so many PC type issues on my Mac. I have done Disk repair in utilities and removed unecessary programs at start up.
My Mac Mini has been running slow since I upgraded to Leopard several months ago. It is not Snow Leopard. My Mac Mini is running software version 10.5.8 and my processor is a 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 with 512 MB RAM. Am I running slow since my Mac Mini is intel? Should I switch it back to Tiger or is there any other suggestions you can make. I have run the disk utility and have run the repair permissions. The computer is especially slow on Safari where it is faster on my MacBook pro.
i posted a while back that my macbook's HDD is failing. i have not yet replaced it but i will by next week. my question is, since my macbook's HDD is failing does this cause my macbook to run slow VERY slow? it has been running slow for the past few weeks. the internet, Pages, Microsoft Word, iPhoto. etc. i have to close every program and just have 1 running. i have 3GB of Ram and it was fast before. when i am typing it tends to freeze for about 2 seconds and then when it unfreezes what ever i typed shows up. is this because of the HDD failure? please let me know because it is driving me insane! i feel like i am using my old windows computer all over again!
My computer crashed yesterday, and when I reboot, it took forever to restart, then crashed a couple more times. I tried a disk repair from the install CD disk utilities, but after an hour or so, it said disk couldn't repair (I think it repaired things like the B-tree and directories). Now it takes 10mins+ to boot, and apps that used to launch right away, take a long time. There's a lag as I type this in now. It's a dual 2ghz PowerPC G5, 3gigs of ram, running on tiger 10.4.11.
I have this MBP 13'' Mac OS X 10.7.5 running a 2.4GHz i5, 4GB RAMs and 500GB storage.The problem started yesterday when I was typing on Word and I copy pasted something from the net (chrome browser) then it froze.I waited for around 5minutes and still frozen with the spinning wheel, then I decided to turn it off by pressing power for 10 seconds restarted my
MBP then now it running so slow on start-up and apps are very slow to open like around 5 minutes. Every action that I try to do like clicking on the apple in the upper left it freezes showing a spinning wheel and it will take time to show the drop down options. I checked disk utility and it said that HD is ok, done verify/permission verify and repair.
I checked the activity monitor noting the ram/CPU usage and its normal it even tells that 2GB of ram is not use.It shows not responding in the activity monitor if you open an app for around 5mins then it opens or it will crash.I already done the 2 kinds of reset and did not work.BUT it opens normally in Safe mode.
my 4 year old IMac 2.4ghz intel core 2 duo with 2gb running 10.7.3 has been running really slow since I installed photoshop CS4 and upgraded to lion ( I have 137gb of free space on hard drive) I mean it wont quit out of photoshop I always have to do a force quit and most applications run really slow. Do I need a new computer , what should I go for to have a smooth running mac?Was thinking of a new IMac 27-inch: 2.7GHz with 4gb memory.
I edit using Lightroom and Photoshop and I'm having an issue while editing. After editing around 8-10 photos in Photoshop the computer starts running unbelievably slow. After each 8-10 photos I have to close down everything and reboot. Even the reboot process is super slow as I have to force quit each application usually 1-2 times to get it to close. Is this normal? I have a 2011 17" with 2.2 GHZ i7 with 8GB ram. Is there any setting that I can change or be aware of.
My macbook is suddenly VERY slow. It can take 10 minutes to open finder or anything else for that matter. I have over 300 GB of space on my internal hard drive so it's be a space issues. The problem started during an import of music from my external hard drive into iTunes. I ended up having to force shut down because it wouldn't respond to anything else. Why is my computer so slow now!?!
I have had my Mac Book Pro for a few years and it freezes all the time. I have to force quit out of my internet at least three times a day if not more, I took it into apple last year and they gave me a new hardrive. I have gone back in twice becuase it continues to freeze and they say nothing is wrong wiht it.
I recently got a Powermac G4 MDD 2003 that I plan to use as my main computer. I have been experiencing issues, where the computer freezes and I have no choice but to hold down the power button, in order to shut down. Also, and music or sounds that are playing at the time repeat the last 0.5 seconds or so of playback. It runs Mac OSX Tiger, and I reinstalled the system yesterday, but not much seems to have changed.
I have had many thoughts as to what causes this issue, like my other computer being connected through the network, my external hard drive, Adobe flash player, and the core system files being corrupt. But none of these have proven to be the issue. I have done a number of system maintenence routines, such as clearing the PRAM, 'fsck -y' from Apple + S on boot (I don't know what its called), and endlessly repairing the disk in disk utility. While writing this message, I got a kernel panic error.
To preface this, this is my friends macbook and I'm very unfamiliar with how they work. However, she had dropped her laptop off her bed (i'm not sure how bad of fall it was) , suffice it to say her screen broke and she asked me to fix it. This turned out to be a fairly routine job, save for the hinge that is a total pain to get back on.
On starting the macbook up, the screen/camera work fine but it is moving at a terribly slow rate. I timed it and it took 3 minutes to get to the login screen, 30 seconds to log in and another 2 minutes for her desktop to load. Once loaded, the applications take forever to start, lag terribly and some crash automatically (safari, ichat) despite being connected to network. On top of this, I have tried restarting/shutting down the computer but this freezes and will show the "thinking circle" for an infinite amount of time.
I have tried the disk utility, and it fails to verify the disk. I'm not sure what else to try, as I am unfamiliar with macs. I fear though, that she damaged her hard drive when it dropped, although once again I'm not sure.
I have a iMac(it is an older one but I forget when I bought it) it has OS X 10.4.11, and 1 GB ram. I have 30 GB of free HD space.
Normally, I run Aol Desktop, Firefox, iTunes and sometimes Microsoft Word. But recently while browsing the internet the Mac will stop working. The music will continue to play and the mouse will still move but everything else stops working. The only way I have been able to fix it is to hold the power button for a couple of seconds.
Also, while trying to zero out my free space the available HD space on my computer went to 0 and the Disk Utility said it would take something like 1 million hours to finish so I skipped that step and when it finished my memory was restored.
So I have a Macbook pro and I have Lion and my computer continues to occasionally freeze while I am running skype. This issue has also occured while I was running Imovie as well. I took it into the Apple store and everyone checked out ok. And when the screen freezes it sometimes goes all black or a grey textured background.
Ive had my macbook for about 2 months and its seemed to working just fine. However today while listening to music it decided to lock up and freeze for a good minute before it would unlock and continue playing the music through itunes. It did this a few times so I finally decided to restart the computer. The first time I booted it it froze on the apple logo and the loading circle. I killed it and rebooted, it takes about four to five minutes to get to the desktop picture, and another five to pull up the main menu bar. I am going to let it sit over night and see if it gives me any error messages, however; I still haven't seen the dock at all, and ive let it start for about twenty minutes now. It will usually show the top menu bar and then the mouse will give me the sbod while it slowly loads up the top menu bar, and usually the clock is a good few minutes behind.
I have tried a pram zap, draining the power off the board, checking the sata connection, unplugging the power, and I ran a hardware check at start up and it said everything was ok. I am currently typing on my tank of a toshiba laptop that still works after being dropped multiple times and has been heavily used for a good 3 years. The mac has been completely useless is most work situations. Its a refurbished 2.53ghz 4gb ram 9600m 512mb 15" mbp. I am thinking of reformatting it and hoping it works, and then selling it and using the money for a new toshiba or a custom built desktop, because I just cant deal with the amount of money and time I have lost trying to deal with this thing while I could have been getting work done.
After the last software update, Safari has been acting strange. It slowed down enormously (I keep on getting the colored beach ball) and it freezes many times for lots of seconds.
My mac keeps freezing, its slow, and the connection to the mouse keeps getting disconnected. can someone help me. please Also up in the right corner were the it shows the internet connection it never shows bars but the internet works.
My safari browser is slow (MacBook Pro 10.6.8). I often have to shut down my computer because it freezes with the spinning color wheel. Sometimes the browser will not be slow when I switch to the chrome browser, but sometimes it is. I may have a logic board problem so I am wondering if that could have anything to do with my slow browser. When I click on Software Update, it shows no software updates (for safari). What could be causing this?
I purchased a new 27 inch 2.8 imac 2 months ago I'm having problems with the computer/screen going black (sometimes grey with vertical lines) and freezing.
This happens frequently when I'm playing World of Warcraft but has recently started to happen when I'm watching youtube videos in full screen. (Do you think its the graphics card?) I originally ran WOW in bootcamp but I had this problem in Windows as well. The only thing I can do when this happens is force the computer off. This happened so often that something got damaged and I had to reinstall OSX. Since this incident I have not reinstalled Windows via bootcamp.
My iMac keeps semi freezing. When I click the mouse and the little color wheel begins to rotate it always freezes. It cannot complete an order to open a program or even take any action. Not even the internet works. To quit I have to unplug the computer. Force quit and even the on/off button doesn't work. I'm running 10.6.8.
I may be using the incorrect terminology, but videos like u-tube, are very slow, to the point of just sitting there, frozen, while it "loads" for a minute or two, then runs for a couple of seconds, then stops to load again, sometimes for several minutes.
I have the small macbook, with SL, 2.4 GHz, 2 GB, 667 MHz. I know this is a standard problem, but there must be something I can do to make it better. I thought maybe the SL would help, but no.
my late 2006 macbook running 10.4.11 has been acting very strange since yesterday. first, it freezes while i'm recording something off of isight and i have to restart. works fine for 30 minutes until it randomly restarts (probably due to heat) and takes me two reboots and some time to fix it (i have to put an ice pack to keep it cool). then later in the night, it randomly restarts again and takes two reboots to get it back. then in the past hour, the screen has frozen, it went into a kernel panic and it randomly restarted again while i was trying to post this the first time. and also, it's been running very hot despite having no applications running.
