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I have repeated freezes when trying to use Safari after installing HD

I installed a Seagate 750GB 7200 RPM hard drive in my wife's MacBook Pro using your guide (excellent, by the way). Everything was smooth for a while, Mac ran a bit faster, now had plenty of room for updates, (original HD was 80 GB, full). After a couple of weeks, we have been having issues with the spinning beach ball of death. At times the Mac won't start up, sometimes when starting Safari the system just hangs.

So far I have zeroed out the data on the new drive, verified the disc and repaired it, repaired permissions and restored the system from my Time Capsule backup, but still keep having the same issue.

Should I be thinking about trying to get warranty coverage on the HD? There were no problems before replacement, the original was just full, or is this a software problem?

Answer this question I have this problem too

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A machine that age may be suffering slowdowns from other than the HD.

  1. Could be that the thermal compound needs replacing .
  2. Could be traffic or interference on the network if this is only noticeable in Safari.
  3. Could be Safari Cache or advertisers having busy routes to a web page.
  4. Could be that you're even on someone else's network if you live in an apartment.
  5. Could be a damaged .plist file or a corrupted font.

Pay particular attention to how many apps you have open, how long since boot and ''exactly what you are doing right before the beachball shows up. You can also look at crash logs for an idea of which app froze.

Failure to boot, and crashing go together like soup and sandwich. Crashing can scramble the MBD which leads to. . . more crashing.

If you don't stop the crashing you can scramble the HD to the point where the machine wont boot, and even to the point where the HD can't be repaired or reformatted.

If this answer is acceptable please remember to return and mark it accepted.

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2 Comments:

I appreciate the input, as it happens, the problem continued to get worse, after multiple attempts to repair the disc using Disc utility from the Snow Leopard install disc, it finally gave me an error message that the disc "could not be repaired". I went to Seagate's site after registering the drive and checked for warranty coverage, and got the message that there was NO warranty on this drive.

I purchased the drive from Amazon (following a link on the iFixit site, wanted the faster RPM) from a company called Finity India. I submitted a request for a return, mailed the unit back today and have been credited for the return already.

Yesterday I reinstalled the original 80 gig hard drive, deleted a few applications my wife has never used to create some more room, and haven't had any problems since.

If I decide to replace the drive in the future, I'll purchase direct from the manufacturer, as I suspect that Finity India got ahold of some seconds, even though they were nit presented that way on Amazon.

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You may have encountered a SATA I/O speed issue as many of the newer drives are SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) but your system is only able to support a SATA I (1.5 Gb/s) drive. If you do try again make sure you get either a HD that is SATA I or get one that can be adjusted or has the ability to auto set its self to the correct speed.

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