Why is my Macbook Pro running so slow and crashing ?

Write off the MS stuff as indicators for now--starting with Office 2008, they developed very long launch times. The time to launch 2008 on my old 1.25Ghz G4 and my MBP 2.2G are virtually the same. Even document opens/saves are slow compared to Office 2004 and earlier.

1) You have adequate hard drive space so that eliminates one of the usual suspects.

2) Check for runaway background processes. Quit all running user applications so the computer is at normal idle. Find Activity Monitor in Applications > Utilities and launch it. If you've not run it before, change the "Show" pulldown at the top of the AM window from its default of "User Processes" to "All Processes." There is a column for "%CPU." Click that column header to sort by CPU usage. Watch the processes "bubble" for about a minute to get a better picture of the usage.

If any process is using more than about 25 percent of the CPU cycles while the computer is idling, post the names of the processes and we can see if they can be eliminated. My MBP shows nothing using more that about 5 percent on any given test run as long as I close all my user apps.

3) If you have never done any sort of maintenance procedures, taht can slow you down. Simply restarting the computer a few times a week clear a lot of temporary files. You also may wish to review this article on the Mac OSX periodic maintenance scripts, which, if run, also do a lot of cleanup:

http://thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html

There are other useful articles on file maintenance associated with the one. Here's the index:

http://thexlab.com/faqs/faqs.html

Check out articles with "Maintain" and "Tuning" in the titles.

4) Use Disk Utility to check the SMART Status of your hard drive. A failing drive can make things slow before it makes things stop.

Huesb, I am having the same problem running the same type of machine but have about 24 GB left on the HD. I checked with the Genius Bar, and the guy thought I had too many apps open. Now I use Adobe Creative Suite CS3, and can have all open at once, or 6-8 InDesign docs open, Pages, Safari and sometimes 3 users (Suite only open in one user account. I got this model specifically to be able to use these apps - my Quicksilver G4 crawled when I did complex charts in Adobe. So for over 2 years things have been going just fine - has been slowing down, shutting down unexpectedly, freezing and requiring restart and a rare kernel panic. Had a new motherboard put in about 9 months ago, battery is new. One big change was that I started selecting "open at login" for Mail, InDesign and Safari and I had lots of apps not opening at all, but the slow down started before that. Not opening apps at login did fix the unresponsive app problem so far. He ran the activity monitor and said that with 2 users open, 6 4 page InDesign docs open, Photoshop, Acrobat 9, Pages and Keynote that it had little left over to work with. Now I am fine upgrading my RAM but I still don't know why it started to slow down to begin with. I rarely had to restart, now like you I am doing it at least 1 x a week. Do you think it knows it is a passe model and is acting like that so I'll buy a new mac?

For anyone's info: checked back in with the Genius Bar when I went to take the Mac in for something else and the tech I talked to thought it was connected to the GeForce NVidia card/logic board so they will replace that (I have AppleCare still but there is also a NVidia recall on my model). Will see. Also have ordered more RAM.

annexit,

take a look at some of my earlier posts on getting my a1226 to run faster. this old macbook pro is really quite speedy now.

S