mail, itunes often unresponsive

[glocke12]

I have a 2.4 gig intel core 2 duo imac running S.L., with all the software updated.

Quite often, mail and itunes just freeze up and I get the spinning rainbow colored wheel.

It happened before my clean install of S.L. also.

Ive deleted pretty much all of non-essential files and programs, but still cant resolve this.

Could this be a hardware based issue, or could it still be something I am running on here ?

 

[celticpride678]

If it is only those two applications, then it is probably not a hardware issue. If ti were to be the entire OS, then it is a hard drive failure.

I would try repairing your permissions in Disk Utility first. If that does not work, try downloading the free application, Onyx, and run all of the maintenance tasks there.

Also, iTunes is a very slow application on Mac OS X. It freezes on many people, including me.

 

[ADent]

How much RAM is in your machine?

If you create a second user and log into that account does it still happen?

 

[deminister]

If it is only those two applications, then it is probably not a hardware issue. If ti were to be the entire OS, then it is a hard drive failure.

I would try repairing your permissions in Disk Utility first. If that does not work, try downloading the free application, Onyx, and run all of the maintenance tasks there.

Also, iTunes is a very slow application on Mac OS X. It freezes on many people, including me.

It is most probably NOT a hardware failure. It is a software glitch. Mail in particular is a real pain in the ass when you often add and remove email accounts or swap plist files with other machines. Downloading mail Vacuum will sometimes help, but often not. Another part of the problem is the crooked Mobile ME sync option. Apple knows for years that it is not properly working. Switching it off and removing all sync information manually may help too.

In other cases you have to reinstall the OS and run the updates, even when the disk seem to have no problems at all. The unresponsive mail is occurring since Tiger and has dragged on till now.