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CEHJFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Evidence for disk failing

I've got a friend with a desktop Mac. She tells me that when she tries to save a document in Word, she sees a wait cursor for quite a long time. One of my hypotheses is that this could be a failing hard drive. Before looking into diagnostics i was wondering if any of you could think of any other apps (likely to be present) that would employ such a wait cursor, so i could eliminate a problem solely with Word. Or maybe you can think of something else?
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Kimputer

It could be LITERALLY ANYTHING causing it.  Taking a look at the resource monitors available should give you pointers (high cpu/disk usage by app xxx?)
A failing disk won't results in a wait cursor though, it would result in big WRITE FAILED warnings.
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ASKER

it would result in big WRITE FAILED warnings.
Where?
The spinning beachball icon on OSX could mean anything and a failing HD is not the most likely.

Use the OSX applications Activity Monitor and Console to see what processes are running, if anything is using a lot of CPU or RAM and Console will show you logs from all the applications and system processes.

If the user is reading/writing Word Docs to an external HD or USB memory stick in particular can be notoriously slow.  If the word document contains resources embedded from network drives or remote sources it can make SAVING a file very slow and the beachball will appear.

If the user has limited Free HD space it can slow the overall system dramatically is it juggles HD space and swapfiles
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ASKER

If the user is reading/writing Word Docs to an external HD or USB memory stick ...
Thanks, i'll check that
Could review the drives smart status with a tool like:
https://www.smartmontools.org/
the best five diagnostic tools for disks here :  http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=693649
pick your choice, and post results plse!
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ASKER

I'm not much of a fan of SMART. I've known drives that are clearly defective pass a health test.
Now this disk did pass a short diagnostic test. I got the owner to run a full test but i don't yet know the outcome.
The box is definitely looking mighty sick. It wouldn't shut down prior to diagnostics so i had to issue sudo halt in Terminal. No response, so forcibly powered off.
I agree with your comments re s.m.a.r.t., just another tool.
Other tools maybe available from the drive manufacturers.
Reset the SMC, then reset the PRAM first before doing anything else.

After that's done, open Disk Utility and run First AID to see if it spots any disk or file corruption.

Sometimes, if the computer's old, you just need to boot into recovery mode and restore the OS, without deleting the data.  When system files become corrupt, you may also experience slowness.
CEHJ were the products i linked to any help ?
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ASKER

We're going to have to be a little patient. I'm in one of those situations where i'm not likely to have physical access to the box. I might suggest a remote. Is it commonplace to use Teamviewer on Mac? If so, i might need to install an old version as i find poor backwards compatibility with that app.
Teamviewer works well on OSX .. its my remote support tool of choice
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ASKER

I'll probably need an old one
why does the latest not work ? post some details
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ASKER

Well i'd have to try. I know that with my client here, if i want to connect to a server and have it work, i need to use Teamviewer 9. That's on Linux
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ASKER

Oh thanks Eoin. That's useful
The suggestion I proposed do not work over team viewer, since they're done before the OS loads up.  Have you tried talking the user through at least the SMC and PRAM reset?  Those two are rather easy to do and should be the very first step before you have access to team viewer.
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ASKER

I'm going to have to close this i think as there has been no feedback
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