Macbook running very slowly

Question

Macbook running very slowly

Hello - I have a white Macbook bought three years ago running Mac OS X 10.4.11 with a 2GHz processor and 1GB SDRAM.

I've been very happy with my purchase and use it mainly for word processing, internet, watching DVDs and email use.

Recently, for no apparant reason, it suddenly began to run very slowly - and I mean slow. It can take 10-15 minutes to open an application.

I have not installed any software or, as far as I know, visited any dodgy websites.

Following some advice from Apple forums I looked at the activity monitor in the utilities folder and this is what I found:

CPU is around 2% used by the user and 2% used by the system with about 96% idle.

System memory is 183MB wired, 184MB active, 255MB inactive, 623MG used.

Disk usage: space utilised 68MB, space free 5.37MB.

Again following advice from Apple forums I created a new user, logged out and logged in again as the new user and the Mac works fine - very quick liked it used to be.

I assume this indicates that the problem isn't with the computer hardware, but with my original user account?

I've tried starting the Mac while holding the Option key down. It seemed to help for a bit and then slowed down again.

I have two CD disks that came with the original documentation - Mac OS X Install Discs 1 and 2.

My question is this - is there any way I can fix the original user account so it runs properly again?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Apr 18, 2011 5:25 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

iVmichael

Level 6

13,740 points

Apr 18, 2011 5:30 AM in response to williamfromskipton

I'd say the reason was that you've less than 10% free space left on the hard drive and it's struggling to cope, consider upgrading the drive and/or delete a load of unwanted items and defragment the drive using Drive Genius or a similar utility.

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Answer 2

Apr 19, 2011 3:59 AM in response to williamfromskipton

Many thanks to Michael for pointing me in the right direction.

I've made some progress on this and thought it might be useful to detail what I did here in case it proves useful to anyone experiencing the same problems.

Prompted by Michael's suggestion that the hard drive was struggling to cope through lack of space I carried out a thorough spring clean of my files, deleting any that I didn't need any more.

Because the machine was responding so slowly this was a laborious process. It may be worth noting that image, sound and video files are big memory eaters.

I also cleared out the trash.

Then I cleared out the library>cache.

I then started the laptop up in safe mode (holding down the shift key after the start-up tone), which also apparantly deletes some unwanted files.

I then started the machine up normally. Much better, much faster. According to the Activity Monitor the space free on the desk has gone from 5.37MB to about 7.5MB.

What to do next? Some disk maintenance my be in order.

Michael suggests Drive Genius, but as far as I can tell this is only available for more recent operating systems that the one I have on my laptop.

Others have suggested OnyX which is free, but this also appears to be for OS X 6 or later.

I haven't to find suitable versions of these yet, so can't comment on their effectiveness.

But now at least I have a functioning laptop

Thanks

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Answer 3

iVmichael

Level 6

13,740 points

Apr 19, 2011 6:36 AM in response to williamfromskipton

For 10.4 this will show you the state of the drive.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/18451/showvolumefragmentation

The simplest way to defragment is to copy everything off the drive, reformat it then copy back ...

You might find this page a useful read/informative:

http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html#6

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