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My Hackintosh developed a strange problem today. I'm not sure what caused it.

 

When switching apps, CPU usage spikes to 100% for about a second in the app I just switched to, and the app and it's menu don't respond for about a second. For example, as I'm typing this, if I right-click on desktop, it will take a second for menu to pop up. If I rightclick on a dock icon, menu will pop up instantly, but, as I move mouse over menu items, they won't start to highlight for about a second. If I click on date in menu, a menu drops down instantly, but it takes a second before I can click on anything in it (and during that time, SystemUIServer spikes to 100%). Interestingly, if I click on close or minimize button of a background app, the action is carried on instantly. But if I switch to that app first, the close or minimize buttons become unavailable for a second on that window.

 

Something like this would be typical of a thrashing system, but I have 2 gig of ram and there is no disk activity.

 

I've tried disabling all non-essential kexts and quitting all apps, including all hidden background apps that can be killed (ie, Palm Pilot HotSync, etc), but nothing seems to help.

 

Any ideas?

ohh i thought it was only a Windows issue eheh

 

QE & CI are enabled?

Yes, and everything works just fine (except the usual Hackintosh issues, like no waking up from sleep, no sound in, etc). I have a feeling it is somehow related to menus, but I can't pinpoint it. Nothing appears in system.log. If it is not related to kexts, or running programs, what could it be? A broken framework of some kind? I guess I could try to make a simple app in Xtools and check in debugger what exactly the app is spending time doing during the switch that is taking a second of CPU time.

Disable a core since you're using PD.

Could you elaborate on this? I heard of some "stuttering" problems with Athlons, but I thought Pentium Ds are working just fine with dual core. Also, I just became aware of this yesterday, after months of using this computer... I'm sure the problem was not occuring before.

Could you elaborate on this? I heard of some "stuttering" problems with Athlons, but I thought Pentium Ds are working just fine with dual core. Also, I just became aware of this yesterday, after months of using this computer... I'm sure the problem was not occuring before.

 

on boot prompt, try typeing fn=3 or idlehalt=0

 

idlehalt=0 helped with my AMD stuttering, but it seems to only work with a certain core designation, mine's is a Toledo Core. It probably wouldn't work the same with a NewCastle or Venice core, for example.

 

check it out, it might help.

 

Disabling a core worked for me too, but my computer took a 30% performance hit.

It would seem that dual core was not the problem.

 

I fixed it by clearing all caches on a hunch with OnyX and rebooting. Now application switching takes no extra CPU time and everything is responding instantly. I'm fairly certain that this is what made the difference, as I had rebooted a number of times already hoping the problem would go away. This fixed it.

 

I don't know enough about OS X, but whatever these caches are for, it sounds a lot like Windows Registry. I don't mean in terms of purpose, but in terms of obscure problems that are very hard to diagnose.

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