I still find the following old actions to be helpful when my computer (MacBook Air OS 10.8.3) gives me trouble:
• restarting several times in a row
• repair permissions
• running maintenance scripts
• clearing cache
• rebuilding services
Onyx is a good piece of free software (http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx) that does these and other maintenance things (aside from restarting several times in a row.)
Before doing all these, be sure to back up.
- Simi
--------------------------------------------------
Simeon Chavel
Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible
The University of Chicago Divinity School
http://divinity.uchicago.edu/faculty/chavel.shtml <http://divinity.uchicago.edu/faculty/chavel.shtml>
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On Apr 16, 2013, at 7:56 AM, Alan Dow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hello Takamitsu,
So it would seem you have plenty of hard disk space.

The other common cause of system slowdown is "Spotlight".
Spot light causes two kinds of problem.
(1) It creates huge invisible files on your hard drive, and
(2) It runs an invisible program in the background on your computer called 'MDS' which can use processing power and can cause delays in reading and writing files to the disk (such as when Nisus tries to open a file?)

As a first (easily reversible) step which can help with (2) above, go to your system preferences, click on the 'Spotlight' icon, then click on 'Privacy'.
Either drag your hard disk icon into the window, or click the '+' button and add your hard disk icon using the dialog.
To be sure this setting is applied, you could then restart your computer, and see if the problem with Nisus is better...

hth..

-----------------------------------------
At 9:46 AM +0200 16/4/13, t muraoka wrote:

Dear A;am.

Many thanks for your advice, which is lucid for a neophyte like me.
My MacbookPro's memory is 4GB. My hard disk is using 92GB and has still
227GB available. My iMac has 2GB, and its hard disk is using 65GB, and has
still 232GB available. It appears then that both still have plenty of free
space, doesn't it?

Cheers,
Takamitsu


On 16/04/2013 04:47, "Alan Dow" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Are you running out of space on your hard drive?

 The amount of free space you need can vary
 depending on how much RAM memory your computer
 has.
 Look under your Apple Menu -> "About This Mac".
 You will see the amount of memory shown there.

 As a rough calculation to find how much hard disk
 space you need (in GB), double the above figure
 for memory, and add 2.
 Nearly all computers now will show the memory in
 Gigabytes (GB). If your computer is old, you may
 see the number quoted as Megabytes (MB). In that
 case, divide by 1000 to convert the number into
 GB.

 For example - my current computer has 4GB RAM
 installed. So I should have a minimum of 10GB
 hard drive space on my startup disk.

 If the hard drive space is a problem, you can
 often reclaim large amounts of space by disabling
 "Spotlight" on your computer, and deleting the
 Spotlight database files from your hard drive.
 These files are hidden, and after years of use
 they can occupy huge amounts of disk space. Of
 course, the down side of disabling spotlight is
 that you lose the indexes which enable your
 computer to speedily search all the files on your
 computer.

 You can disable Spotlight by entering commands in
 the Terminal program (google "Disable Spotlight"
 for instructions). If you find that challenging,
 you may consider buying software called
 "Spotless". It comes in separate versions for OS
 10.5 and 10.6, so your best path would be to buy
 the 10.5 version first, then pay the upgrade
 price for the 10.6 version.

 hth.. AD

 ==========================================
 At 7:18 PM +0200 15/4/13, t muraoka wrote:

Hello everybody,

 I wonder if any of you could help me.

 When I start working on a NW file, a
 multi-coloured sunflower-like thing appears and
 starts revolving, which seems to last for ages.
 So long as it¹s turning round, I can¹t work on
 the file. Does anyone know what this is and how
 can I stop this or get rid of this sunflower?
 It¹s a real nuisance.

 Cheers,
 Takamitsu