[h00ktern]

Installed 10.5.6 & DellEFI 1.1, via external usb CD method, without incidence about a week ago. It went so well, I convinced my friend to buy a mini and an OSX disk, and I performed the install on his a few nights ago. Again, no snags whatsoever. Should have known things went to easily :lol:

This morning, he called to say his mini was "locking-up" when he ran Safari. Mmmm, I thought... my mini was running perfect just a few hours before his call. I fired mine up, and wouldn't you know, the OS would log on naturally, then slow like it was running on qualudes. The mouse would track normally, but clicks wouldn't register; ironically, run the pointer over the Finder menu and items would flash up normally. In every other aspect, the system was frozen. I rebooted several times. I eventually discovered that if I waited a minute or two after a single command was issued, the OS would respond. WTF! :roll:

I eventually decided after several attempts at EFI re-installs, and deleting, regenerating the dsdt file, to try copying my back-up in SuperDuper. When SD wouldn't load before I grew old, I went to the extreme - complete re-install... from a single pass erase, to re-partition of the SDD. Do you have any idea how long it takes to learn MAC keyboard shortcuts on the fly?!? Mouse still didn't work...

After the OSX install, I managed to fumble around with the keyboard shortcuts to the best of my ability and work my way around. Get this - I couldn't figure out the key shortcuts to change focus in windows, and accidentally discovered I could enable Voice accessibilty w/ Fn+Alt+F6, and OSX would change focus in the window so I could Tab, Enter, and Spacebar my way through selections. I have no Left click, touch tap (enabled), and only Right click works to select - sometimes only when holding it down. In Pref pane windows, it doesn't work on the x_+ buttons :roll:

On the up side, it doesn't seem my OS is running through mud anymore, and I haven't fubar'd my friend's yet

I'm stumped. I thought a full wipe and install would have fixed it, but apparently not. I'm even more stumped since my friend's mini began this downward spiral first :roll:

Any ideas? [and thanks for reading]

*Edit UPDATE*

It definitely seems hardware/driver related - I can run around the OS using the keyboard, but the touchpad/left button is inneffective. But what are the chances that the other mini suffered an identical attack - no way...

[-bat.]

What SSD do you have ? Your "running in mud" sounds exactly like what I have on my Mini and that is down to a very slow SSD, which is about to get replaceed with a RunCore. If you wwant to verify this then try installing OSX
onto an external hard drive and you will see it runs fine.

[h00ktern]

It's the STEC 16g. My Runcore 64 is on it's way; my friend is getting the 32g ;-)

It was running fine. When I mean slowed down, I mean it suddendly happened... between boots, where it took a minute or two to register a single command e.g. close an open window - no other inputs to add-up the workload. One! Subsequent reboots did not change anything. BTW, the SDD checked-out fine in Dell's Diagnostics program.

Still no clue on the system-wide slowdown as yet, but I think I narrowed the touchpad down to hardware. Stripped it earlier and verified the micro-switches are good on the buttons, and the ribbons were seated. Guess she's taking a ride back to Dell shortly. Seems the touchpad is glued to the bottom of the palm-rest, and the button ribbon is affixed to its board. Probably quicker to ship it than how long I am going to spend on the phone straining to understand the other person on the end of the phone...

The saga continues. Maybe I'll screw with the other mini and search for the cause of the Molasses Meltdown... this wouldn't be any fun if everything worked perfectly...