[OT] Looking For OS X Troubleshooting Suggestions

[Scott Rossi]

Hi List:

Apologies for posting something other than a EULA opinion, but I'm wondering
if someone might have some experience with an OS X system that is throwing
random beachballs all over the place (10.6.8).  Scroll a list of files in
the Finder = beachball; launch an application = beachball; create a new
email message = beachball.  I've used Disk Utility to repair the disk and
permissions (nothing major appeared to be found).  I've run a test on RAM
using MemTest, with apparently no problems found.  I've been watching
Activity Monitor to see if there's anything sucking up processor use --
nothing appears to be out of the ordinary (that I know of).  I'm now trying
an app called Onyx to see if it will find anything worth addressing.

Short of reinstalling the system (days worth of labor), I'm at a loss for
what else to try.  The one thing I found online is that the Spotlight
indexing process can sometimes go crazy and intermittently bog down the
processor -- Onyx supposedly allows you to disable this but I'm not certain
this is the problem (not a regular culprit in Activity Monitor).

Not sure if this means anything but apparently I can't reset PRAM on the
system (Intel Mac Mini).  I've tried several times with multiple keyboards,
without success.  I believe with Lion and above maybe this is supposed to be
unnecessary, but it's supposed to work with Snow Leopard and earlier, yes?

Anybody have any ideas for something else to look for?  I know some of you
do more low level tinkering than I.  Restarts help for a while, but I can
only restart the system so many times...

Thanks for any suggestions.

Best Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, UX Design