What the hell is going on with my MacBook?

[Don Vito Corleone]

I have a Core 2 Duo MacBook made in the fall of 2006. It has been exhibiting a lot of weird problems lately.

My machine is stock except that the HD has been replaced with a 250GB WD model (I previously had a Hitachi that cratered after about a year). I am running Leopard with all current updates. If it matters I have Time Machine installed on a 500GB Time Capsule, which I use for my internet access through a cable modem. I last created a new install of Leopard about six months ago.

My problems started when Firefox (and Shiretoko, which I also have installed) began running slower and slower. It finally pretty much stopped working altogether, so a few months ago I moved to Safari as my main browser, although I prefer Firefox.

Now, I am having a host of problems with the Dock and Finder.

Everytime I reboot the machine, my Dock settings reset to a version from several months ago, so there are a couple of programs in the Dock that are no longer installed (they are replaced with question marks). iToner, which I never use, is set to start when the computer starts, and when I disable it it always comes back on reboot.

The Downloads stack in the Dock is completely screwed up. Everytime I download a file, two copies of it appear in the stack. At this point there are many dozens of things there (despite the fact that the actual folder has only about ten items), and so it is more or less useless.

My default browser keeps resetting to Shiretoko, which is annoying as hell since at this point it won't even start, and I have to Force Quit it.

Does anyone have any bright ideas about what might be going on here, or suggestions on how to fix it? Thanks in advance to anyone who has any thoughts or advice.

 

[TheStu]

Well, I am not going to recommend that repair permissions since I have yet to see a single instance where that actually fixes problems anymore.

So, let us start with some quick questions.
1: How much RAM is in the system?
2: Have you tried all this under a different user account?*
3: Have you dropped the MacBook disk into the system and hold down D while it booted?**
4: Have you tried uninstalling (use AppCleaner) and reinstalling Firefox?
5: Is your system fully updated?

*I once installed the Little Snitch 2 Beta and it completely fubared my system. iPhoto wouldn't open, settings were all screwed up, and a bevy of other problems. Under a different user account, none of the problems existed.

**This puts the system into a hardware diagnostic mode, and you can run a memory test, it could be that the RAM is corrupted somehow, bad RAM can cause huge problems across all kinds of things.

 

[Don Vito Corleone]

Things do seem to work better under another user account, but transferring all the files from my existing account to another seems like a huge hassle. Maybe one of these days when I have a few hours I'll just wipe the HD and reinstall OS X, then use my Time Capsule to restore the files. That or just wait until the refreshed MB comes out with Snow Leopard . . .

For what it's worth I have 2 GB and the memory and HD tests find nothing wrong.

Thanks for your input!

 

[TheStu]

Well, you can quickly transfer your things by copying the Library folders, (then actually do run repair permissions, that will be necessary there), but then you will be left in the same spot as you are now since that will copy over whatever is causing the problem.

So, the best way to go about it might just be to start from scratch as best you can. It sucks, and I have no idea what caused it without more intimately knowing what all you have installed/uninstalled on your system.

I find that OS X and Windows are both incredibly rock solid OSes, UNTIL you start to muck around with a lot of beta apps and that sort of thing. I reformatted a lot back in school, maybe every 4-6 months or so, simply because I was constantly adding and removing apps, messing with betas, dual, triple and even attempting a quad boot and many, many other things that were all tied to being an SE student that was trying to learn a new OS while learning new programming languages and lots of new software.

Since I have mostly stopped doing that, the last time I 'reformatted' was about 6 months ago, but it was a 1.5 year block before that (I would clone my drive back and forth for dual booting purposes but never did a true reformat) everything was acting up, from flash being worse than usual, to even standard def AVIs causing a massive amount of stutter on my system (this system that will play back 720p MP4s and MKVs with ease). So i decided to just reformat and start from scratch.