It's very unlikely you downloaded something or broke everything with one download. Also - with at least 4 things not working well - please protect your pictures, emails just in case it's a hardware failure.
When only one thing is broken - it's often worthwhile to poke, learn, understand what broke and look for a fix of that one issue.
For any group of three or more problems, there's one solution that always works (and often saves a lot of time):
- Back up anything you can't afford to loose and get someone who is a bit tech savvy to verify you have a workable backup that you can restore if needed.
- Erase the mac and install just a clean system from the media that came with the mac.
This will quickly let you know if the hardware has failed. It will also solve nearly all software issues. Once you have surfed the web, made sure it is reliable, then you can run updates, restore your personal files and get on knowing it was just some corruption of the software.
Don't feel bad getting help from someone (even paid) if your savvy is for things other than a computer. A good tech can erase and install Mac OS X in 10 to 30 minutes. A good tech might take 4 hours to 4 days to pick apart all the things that could be wrong and tell you what happened. With multiple issues, it's hard to tell what was the root cause and what was just a subsequent failure.
It's often so much easier and efficient to just clean up the mess, start fresh, and keep an eye for any sign of the problems recurring. You will then have better data on the problem. You will also have a backup of your important files.
Since your computer can't tell if it has enough memory to run, (or is truly out of space) you can't really trust itself to fix itself which is why I jumped right to backup / restore for anyone on a situation as you describe. Also, if you were to determine exactly what broke, and did the fixes right, if it freezes or doesn't complete your fix - you will still be in the same badly working situation.
Best of luck - some good people have made answers with great advice here as to what could be wrong. I wanted to weigh in with a different sort of advice since no-one (you included) had mentioned protecting your data files.
Sounds like the CD drive is malfunctioning. This could be caused by many different problems, from partially detached cables inside the laptop to just a dirty CD slot and/or laser lens. One simple weird trick is to take a can of compressed air and give the CD slot a blow-out when not loaded with a disc.
There are CD laser lens cleaning discs, including this version with a 3.5" floppy disc cleaner included!
Best Answer
I've seen precisely this problem on many, many versions of macOS, both release and beta. Usually the delay is caused by some Apple process. For me, diagnosing is not the problem, the problem is fixing it.
You didn't say how much memory your computer has. A few years ago, Apple introduced compression on virtual memory. This is especially important in SSD-based computers: it decreases wear on the SSD to just compress memory, rather than sending it out to mass storage. But more and more programs are using more and more memory. So most of the freezes I've seen are related to long-running processes, typically Apple's processes used for things like curating photographs or background indexing of the SSD, waking up, having lots of memory decompressed, making the program you are using have its memory compressed, and then the scheduler changing its mine and giving your program memory. One of the related problems is that the Mach process scheduler doesn't seem to be as memory and swapping aware as it should be.
Your question is about how to diagnose this, so here's what I do:
ps aux
every second and stores the result in another file.ps aux
to see which process was taking up the most memory or the most CPU.If you are pretty sure you have identified the process, you can STOP it without killing it. See if this makes the problem go away.
Once you've identified the culprit, you have a problem. It's typically an Apple process, not your own, not a third-party driver, not anything that you have control over. Here are some of the things I've tried:
Create a new user on your computer and try using it without copying over all of your files. Does the problem go away? If so, it's either that your profile is corrupted or, more likely, a file in your profile is causing the problem. Now you can slowly copy things into the new profile until you have identified the problem.
Sometimes I've found individual files that causes the full-text indexing program to blow up the amount of memory it needs or to crash. I delete those files and the problem goes away.
Sometimes I just wipe the computer and restore my files. That works.
Good luck. This is annoying and it's almost certainly apple's fault.