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The last wee while I’ve been driven every so slowly mad by an occasional freeze/hang that my Mac has been suffering the last wee while. I’d be busy typing away, doing my thing, when the keyboard would become unresponsive. No Option-Tab, nothing. Mouse still worked. If iTunes was playing it’d play for 5-10 seconds then pause very briefly, before the whole computer would kick back in to life. And it was slowly becoming more frequent.

The geek in me was curious about what was causing the problem, but the busy remote worker was hugely frustrated because it’d always (seem) to happen just at the worst possible moment. But I never quite had time for the ’sod it’ re-install of the OS I was minded to try (which is really a rather trivial thing on a Mac, as it cleanly separates the OS from applications and user data, unlike, say, a PC).

So I started disabling/removing apps that I could do without. I need Parallels, which was my first suspect (having recently upgraded it). But it was hanging without it running (unless it was one of the kernel drivers it uses). Then TunnelBlick (An OpenVPN client). Ditto the hangs. Even shutting down iTunes for a while didn’t help. I uninstalled the Safari v3 beta, and did a reboot, as that app seems to get its mits everywhere (Did Apple learn nothing from Microsoft?), and I’d read about Cocoa apps suffering at the hands of this new version. No joy. But as I rebooted I noticed my menu bar apps were taking a long time to start up. Hmmmmm.

So I removed iStat Menus, an application I had become rather fond of (if mainly for the date in the clock widget!). And since then, well, things seem to have returned to normal. I plan to let it run for a while longer, as well as move back to Safari 3 (which has a few features I really rather miss, particularly the new searching) before being conclusive. And yes, I’ll probably be notifying the author of the app (presuming the inbound link doesn’t alert them) once I’m happy.

But so far, my Mac user experience has returned rather nicely to normal, and I thought I’d share the love (as well as post something that’s not running related…)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Apple, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.