Installation freezes and makes computer slow

  • drjpayne
    First I have to say that I really love Zotero and I'm very grateful to the whole team for creating it. I have used it for many years. But about a year (or more?) ago, installation --which had been quick and painless -- suddenly became this huge, very slow process that brings my machine to a halt. The cursor freezes, I get the spinning beachball of death, the laptop fans itself nonstop, and I am forced to stop all other activity until the installation is finished. Once it's done, everything runs fine. I'm using a Macbook Pro with the beta version of standalone Zotero (I have nothing online, so syncing is not an issue). The beta version gets updated all the time, so this is annoying behavior.
  • dstillman
    You're referring to version updates? When Zotero says that a new version is available and you click update? How long does it take? What do you see in Activity Monitor when this happens?

    An update between close beta versions should take literally a second or two — there are only tiny differences in text files that need to be applied. So if you're seeing something different, there's definitely something wrong. We don't generally recommend this, but in your case I'd recommend deleting Zotero from Applications and redownloading it. It's possible something in your app package got corrupted and it's falling back to a full update each time.

    If the problem continues after that, it's likely to be something non-standard on your system interfering, but start with this.
  • drjpayne
    Yes, I was referring to the updates. They take something like 2-5 minutes, maybe? And definitely the machine is doing some heavy computation at the time, because the CPU is working like crazy. Thank you for the rapid reply and your suggestion. I'll try reinstalling and will report back.
  • dino97
    Also it might be a problem with your machine, if its somewhat old and is filled with different background processes

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