Oh, and since it's a laptop, it might have some power-saving feature that slows the CPU down. Usually this only happens when not much is going on (it speeds up when there's a high demand for the CPU) but you might want to investigate your laptop's power-saving features and crank the CPU speed up if that's an option.

(You can click on the head of the CPU column to sort the processes by CPU usage %.)

I had no idea! When I've needed to check, I've always scrolled around looking for the high usage process. You just made my day!

When the computer is acting slow, is there a lot of disk activity?

I don't know what this means. If it means, "is it loud?" Then yes.

Oh, and when the computer is acting slow, is the CPU usage low?

I don't know. It's better now, and I'm afraid to open IE, because it'll just mess everything up again, and I'll have to reboot and stuff.

or is the program you're using (IE, Firefox, etc.) high and everything else has a low CPU usage?

Right now, that is the case (with Firefox being high).

but you might want to investigate your laptop's power-saving features and crank the CPU speed up if that's an option.

How would I check that?

Also, you guys are Teh Awesome.

vw, you might try

1. going into Add/Remove Programs,
2. click on the Add/Remove Windows Components button on the left,
3. uncheck Internet Explorer, Next, follow wizard
4. click on Add/Remove Windows Components button,
5. check Internet Explorer, Next, follow wizard.

Hopefully that'll repair what's ailing IE (well, more than usual).

Is a motherboard's SATA 3Gb/s connector backwards compatible with an older 1.5Gb/s SATA drive?

[link]

SATA 3Gb/s is backward compatible with SATA 1.5Gb/s, allowing SATA 1.5Gb/s hardware to interface with SATA 3Gb/s ports and vice versa. However, some systems that do not support SATA speed autonegotiation may require that the drive's speed be manually limited to 150 MB/s with the use of a jumper for a 300 MB/s drive.

Thank you Tom (& Wikipedia!).

Bah. My iBook is not doing well, and I can't afford a new one at the moment.

What it's doing is making a clicking sound. It clicks continiously at slightly more than one click per second. It's not coming from the speakers, but is something mechanical inside. It starts clicking the moment I power it on (i.e. before the OS loads). So far, I've been afraid to let it run like that.

I'm at a loss as to what is making the sound. How many moving parts are there in an iBook? There's the CD drive, the HD drive, the CD and HD read-write heads, and the cooling fan.... I don't think it's any of those, but what else could it be?

I'd take it to an Apple repair place, but I don't think it's worth spending much money on as I'm gonna buy a new one soon. (It's a 900 mhz G3.)

Well, if you are comfortable pulling the machine apart I'd go through each scenario and disconnect an item each time to narrow it down. I'd put money on the hard drive to be honest. Those are what fail most often. The fans tend not to click at that low of a rate. It could be the CD. If it is a tray loading CD drive then try placing some light pressure against the drive door while it is clicking and see if you can feel the mechanism shifting at all.

But yeah, I'd guess HD with CD as a close second. I would certainly do a full drive backup immediately as a precaution.

I'm with ND. Clicking at that speed sounds like a hard drive to me.