some questions from a newbie

[Hobbit]

Hello everyone,

I recently converted to Mac by getting an iBook 1.33 and, to be honest with you, i've been abusing it by installing all sorts of demos and free junk programs that seem first to be useful and then turnout to be a waste of space. Anyway I'm now facing the following problems:

1) When i turn on my ibook, it seems to be searching for files...it shows in the centre of the screen a symbol of a 'globe' then the 'finder' icon alternating with a question mark. This shows up for a while then it commences the normal startup process by showing the 'apple' in the middle of the screen. Any idea what could be the problem? I checked 'startup disk' from 'system preferences' and it only has two items (osx tiger and network startup) is the network startup icon supposed to be there?)

2) It's taking my ibook much longer time to start up than it used to...how can i make it faster?

3) When i use my ibook now, it feels very 'heavy' and frequently especially when i'm using firefox to surf the net it freezes for a while showing the spinning colours cursor. I feel as if the programs i downloaded are making the computer heavy so i downloaded some by deleting all relative files from spotlight. is there anything else i need to do when i uninstall programs to make sure that my ibook is absolutely clear of any remnant files?


I would appreciate your help with the above questions. Thank you.

 

[mad jew]

Go back to System Preferences and select your hard drive. Whilst the network start up should appear there, it should not be selected because it means each time you start your computer it has to search for available network boot disks before going to the internal hard drive. This should speed up the start up process.

It's fine to delete apps by dragging to the trash in most cases. As a rule of thumb, if it came with an installer then it should probably leave with an installer though. Usually these uninstallers are easy to find.

As for general slowness, open Activity Monitor and see if there's a process using up a lot of CPU or RAM. How much free space do you have on the hard drive? It really should be more than 8GB if possible. How much RAM do you have?

 

[wnameth]

i second the checking your HD/system profiler, you shouldn't need to buy anything after market if you are only doing basic stuff.. 512mb of ram is fine for average things.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

It's fine to delete apps by dragging to the trash in most cases.

And to add to that: Also remember to Empty Trash.

Ignore me if this is obvious for you... but there has been more than a few new Mac users that needed to be reminded of this...

Also look for rouge logfiles and such (and remember that some filesharing applications actually reserve the whole space for a download when it starts one a new, fast eating up your HD space). Use OmniDiskSweeper (free one day licenses available at the OmniGroup site) to look where all the HD space went...