[geeks] Odd MacOS X issue

[Ido Dubrawsky]

My wife's titanium Mac Powerbook is starting to exhibit an odd behavior.
She's running Tiger on it (fully patched) with Firefox 3.5.3 and as of
three days ago certain websites have become unbearably slow in loading.
I have no problems accessing those websites from my systems (Vista SP1,
XP SP3, or Windows 7 RC) using Firefox 3.5.2 (or even IE8).  I'm not
100% sure what the problem is so I'm asking those with more Mac
knowledge than I.



I've looked through the system logs and find no errors being thrown.
The load average looks ok and my wife usually just uses it for Web and
mail (she uses Mac Mail as well as FF 3.5.3 - no enabled add-ons).  This
slow behavior shows up in both Firefox as well as Safari.  I'm
considering that it could be an issue with the hard drive (possibly bad
blocks), memory (less likely as this should manifest itself as a system
crash), or something in the OS.  I've ordered a new hard drive, memory
and I'm going to get a copy of Leopard to see if one of those will work.




I'm stumped as to what might be causing it though.  The interesting
thing though is that when I run my ISP's speedtest (I use SpeakEasy DSL)
at http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest, it does the download test just
fine (comes out to ~ 1270 kbps) but the upload test never works (it
works on my Windows systems though).  I'm wondering if it could be a
problem with the Flash install on the Mac but I'm not sure how that
would manifest itself.



Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I should look at as well?



Ido



--

Ido Dubrawsky

Network Security Architect

dubrawsky.org

http://idubrawsky.wordpress.com




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