So our church rig is a 5 year-old iMac running Mavericks and utilizes ProPresenter v5. We output to a TripleHead2Go to drive our main displays and we were utilizing a Sabrent display adapter to run a confidence/stage display (though that recently failed). We now take the third output from the TH2GO and run that to the FOH projector.
Over the past few weeks we've been noticing a disruptive slow-down in how the computer would load slides, particularly video. Today it came to a head and was freezing a few times a minute and completely failed to play a video. On the surface it seems like a buffering issue as it will run, pause (spinning wheel of death) and then continue at random intervals. However, it has 8GB of memory, over half of which is going unused and there are no smoking guns in the processes either.
It is a multi-use computer in the sense that many people have access to it, though it is generally used to play music and other media for services. After today, I went ahead and applied everything that the Figure 53 guys recommend for QLab since I use that for my day job, but as I was using the computer it became more and more bogged down, to the point where opening a Finder window would take 1-3 minutes- all while still showing little loading on the CPU and/or memory.
I grew up as a Windows/PC guy, so while I understand the mechanics of what a computer needs, I'm at a loss to find the tricks with a Mac and I feel like there might be something I'm missing. My gut is saying this might be a failing hard drive, but running the startup disk utility didn't immediately show anything useful or wrong. I also recall Macs having a hard time with cooling, and that over time the components would fail just out of heat stress, is this still a thing?
My main question to the more Mac-enlightened of the board- where to begin?
Over the past few weeks we've been noticing a disruptive slow-down in how the computer would load slides, particularly video. Today it came to a head and was freezing a few times a minute and completely failed to play a video. On the surface it seems like a buffering issue as it will run, pause (spinning wheel of death) and then continue at random intervals. However, it has 8GB of memory, over half of which is going unused and there are no smoking guns in the processes either.
It is a multi-use computer in the sense that many people have access to it, though it is generally used to play music and other media for services. After today, I went ahead and applied everything that the Figure 53 guys recommend for QLab since I use that for my day job, but as I was using the computer it became more and more bogged down, to the point where opening a Finder window would take 1-3 minutes- all while still showing little loading on the CPU and/or memory.
I grew up as a Windows/PC guy, so while I understand the mechanics of what a computer needs, I'm at a loss to find the tricks with a Mac and I feel like there might be something I'm missing. My gut is saying this might be a failing hard drive, but running the startup disk utility didn't immediately show anything useful or wrong. I also recall Macs having a hard time with cooling, and that over time the components would fail just out of heat stress, is this still a thing?
My main question to the more Mac-enlightened of the board- where to begin?
