Rock Solid machine getting flakey and going downhill fast

Hey troubleshooters,

I have an ASUS Sandy Bridge machine I have been running for over a year, updating all along the way to 10.7.3 It's got a nice CPU, 16G RAM, a decent video card, and has been been running flawlessly, and even better and faster than my newer iMac.

All of the sudden, starting last week, funny things started happening. At first, it was just the beach ball of death in finder, but strangely enough, all other apps would work. If I kept going, eventually everything would hang, with the wonderful spinning ball--mouse would still move, but all keyboard input appeared dead, and I would have to power-cycle.

After a fresh boot, things would be okay for at least a half-hour, and then eventually the same things would happen. I tried running and not running all differnet applications, turning off all login apps and connections, but nothing seemed to matter. I also scoured the logs, especially the kernel.log looking for anything indicating a problem. I didn't find anything terrible, and nothing that wasn't also present in older logs from before the problems.

There wer no updates, no new installations, and really nothing changed as far as I can remember. I finally formatted the SSD and reinstalled Lion from a known-good Time Machine backup.

The system is still hanging. Seems like maybe a hardware issue, but I don't know what of how to stress of check the drive, memory, cpu, etc. Does this sort of thing sound familiar to anyone, or could you tell me some specific things to check?

The hardware in my sig is correct--thanks for any help--this is the best community I've seend for us [H|M]ack* enthusiasts.

try verifying your disk permissions in disk utility.

and verifying the disk as well.

tom.humphrey said:

try verifying your disk permissions in disk utility.
and verifying the disk as well.

Click to expand...

I should have mentioned that those were the first things I did. Thanks though.

Also, there's plenty of space left on the main SSD (45G), and my machine wasn't infected by that Java virus from a few weeks ago. I think I've thought to check all the obvious things, but I may have overlooked something really stupid. Thanks!

some of your issues sounds vaguely like failing ram or disk.

see if you can run memtest (find on google) to verify your ram... if you have a windows install handy, you can easily make a bootable usb drive that will run it for you. try to let it run at least 3 full repeats (or longer). If your ram is fine, then you should receive NO errors. Any errors, then test your ram stick by stick to see which one(s) has/have the problem.

edit: if you only have a mac available, you can get memtest to test most of your ram by installing applejack with the memtest optional install enabled. follow their directions to run it from single user mode. On 10.7, i would not use most of the other applejack options as I don't think it has been updated yet, just fyi (but memtest will befine to use).