the endless beachball of death

my gf gave me her black macbook 13" to try to get running because she absolutely got sick of that crap. I can see why. While trying to back things up first, it refused to mount my external usb hard drive. THen i figured "ok, maybe bad chip in that thing" (mind you it works great under windows and linux w/o extra drivers), so i tried to mount my mp3 player (Cowon X5) and it failed as well (also mounts under win and lin perfectly w/o extra drivers), both are formated in FAT32 (hdd is 40gb, mp3 is 30gb). Worst came to worst and i had to back up 20gb worth of stuff on DVDs. I managed to burn her documents, photos, videos, and music (all together took 4 dvds) w/o much crap using the program called Burn. Once it came time to back-up applications (that i don't know if she has install disks for or not) Burn crapped out and kept freezing. I then tried to "create a burn folder" and that crapped out as well. At that point i needed to Force Quit everything...and then ended up restarting the computer a few times b/c Finder kept perma-freezing. Sometimes it even froze while trying to restart. Of course I don't even have to mention the endless "beach ball of death"... that thing just kept on truckin'.

So basically if I am really frustrated w/ this crap after only 3 hours, I can only imagine how she feels every damn day. So where I stand right now is a macbook that is down right useless, data/media is all backed up (not applications), and the OSX disk i threw @ it, it would refuse to boot off it so i couldn't reinstall. Though what might be the problem is that its not the official restore disk, I am gonna try to get my hands on one of those and try that because the way i see it a complete reinstall of osx and start from scratch is hte only way to fix this trainwreck. Alternatively.... I am very tempted to install some sort of linux right now but i don't have any macbook-specific distros burned (elive macbook ?... for obvious reasons) so prolly gonna have to keep that in my pants for now

anyway....just wanted to let 'er rip. I'll post back later if I have problems/questions/comments while reinstalling (once i get the restore disk) or configuring (post-install).....

fairly sure everything on the hardware end works fine...except the battery which occasionally shocks you.... but that shouldn't be causing uncontrollable lag and just DOG SLOW-ness. I had XP run smoother on a 233mhz pentium w/ 64mb ram than this.

it was indeed a software issue. i reinstalled osx and everything is running fairly smoothly (so far) . still kinda bugs me that this computer has 512mb ram, really could use a gig since osx is reasonably bloated (not quite Vista or Suse-like...but it ain't no Elive either)

i am not spending money on her lappy. prolly not gonna earn me too many brownie points though 512mb sticks i looked up cost around $35...gotta get 2 of em though b/c stock config is 256x2.... at that point just 1 stick of 1gb is that same $70 so at least there you already have 1.25gb... so there you have it.

off ram but still a topic regarding this thread which is essentially my attempt to configure her macbook... she has an actual AOL account (as opposed to AIM) and she claims that 3-rd party IM clients (Adium in this case) won't allow her to log on b/c of the fact that it is the AOL account instead of an AIM. I call BS on that...googled and seem to not find anything relevant. Whats your take? What could be the problem why Audium is not working?

Of course the windows AOL client is rubbish, I hate to see how the mac is.

what are you talking about there stu? i have never had problems with gaim and i've been using it from 1.0 to 2.0.0beta6... works great. also pidgin acts the same as gaim (2.0 anyway) always did... just changed artwork and a few minor tweaks to comply with AOL's bloodthirst. I actually dislike AdiumX compared to Pidgin...maybe its just b/c i am used to Gaim/Pidgin but it feels more logically organized and way less cluttered.

That said... I now wanna report back on my AOL account not logging on to Adium problem. First I thought she might have messed up something in the settings, so I deleted everything she did and tried from scratch, set everything up myself and it kept giving me "wrong password" or "wrong account" errors. Then I downloaded Fire and tried that, same problem. Then to make sure account was legit I tried loggin on to AIM Express and it confirmed the account. So finally I just set up iChat and her account worked on iChat. iChat is no Adium...but at least its a step up from AOL's nightmare of a client.