Bizarre Mac OSX problems

[Russ]

Hi Guys,

I was hoping for some help before i resort to a full reinstall.

Having a few problems with my mac. It's like it's short term memory issues. I bookmark something, it disappears, I click remember password for a website, it forgets it, I've upgraded skype and despite it being opened 100 times, i STILL get the bloody welcome/setup message. If i pin top sites in safari, the pins fall out.

It was fine up until a few weeks ago, nothing out of the ordinary has been installed.

I don't have a time machine back up from the days it worked fine, so do i have a choice besides backing up my pictures/music/movies and reinstalling OSX?

27" iMac, i5 2.8ghz 8mb cache, 4GB ram is the spec, incase you wondered.

Thanks in advance.

[mrt9888]

You could try using Onyx to clear disk permissions etc, if it still doesn't work it would be quicker to reinstall than trying to find out whats wrong.

[Russ]

it's looking that way, need to do some backing up i think

[artaxerxes]

If you reinstall with migration assistant you will lose none of your settings, but restore everything to kosher.

I would always advise a fully bootable backup with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! before doing that. If it is a hardware problem then re-installing might hose everything. Is your ram 3rd Party?

[watercooled]

Doesn't disk utility sort disk permissions? I know nothing about using Macs, mind. I just remember hearing that a while ago...

[mrt9888]

Yes it does but using something like Onyx which has other maintenance scripts makes it easier to do them in one go.