My Mac is very, very slow

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Level 1

18 points

My Mac is very, very slow

Hi there,

Need help. Have MacBook Pro for last 5 years. It has OS X 10.5.8, 2 GB RAM and 4 GB of free cpace on 80 GB HD. Recently it became very slow. I mean REALLY slow. Except for the web page that I can scroll up and down for everything else i see spininning color wheel a lot, actually all the time. I go to save something and scrolling through file list makes sliding stop and I see color wheel. If I open Word to type something or e-mail, letters I typed appear later after s1-3 seconds and so on. I try to keep just a one or two programs opened.

I tried to use Activity Monitor (utilities) and looked at CPU load and memory load and see nothing dramatic there. Low load on CPU and 300-400 MB of free RAM. Disk activity monitor displays peaks even that I am not saving anything at the moment. I really don't know what to look at to recognize a bottleneck in the system.

I must say that my oldest 20" iMac (about 6 years old) slowed dramatically with about same simptoms. My newest 24" iMac is still the fastest of the bunch but it is kind of going in same direction by slowing down. This is typical Windows behaviour and when I started purchasing Macs they promised me that it will never happen.

Regards,

Zack

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Feb 26, 2012 7:23 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

jk_baller23

Level 4

2,129 points

Feb 26, 2012 7:28 AM in response to Zack P.

I would try running Onyx (freeware), and use some of it's scripts/maintenance. I personally don't use everything it comes with, but I use to repair permissions and do maintenance. I've found that it speeds things up a bit.

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Answer 2

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,541 points

Feb 26, 2012 8:29 AM in response to Zack P.

Your hard drive may be failing. Check its SMART status and run the extended version of the Apple Hardware Test. Even if those tests are negative, it may still be failing.

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Answer 3

Zack P. Author

Level 1

18 points

Feb 26, 2012 8:46 AM in response to Linc Davis

I'll try both suggestions. For second one I don't see why would HD slow down things if it is not being used at that very moment, but again Linc Davis you must know better. I am just an average user.

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Answer 4

Shootist007

Level 6

16,703 points

Feb 26, 2012 8:49 AM in response to Zack P.

In OS X the hard drive is constantly being read from and written to. A slow and or failing hard drive can cause the complete system to slow down.

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Answer 5

May 1, 2012 6:41 AM in response to Zack P.

HI zack- not sure if your problem has been resolved, but I have a MacBook pro with similar specs and experienced a similar issue. I think the issue is not having enough free space on your hard drive. In general you should keep about 10-20% of your drive available for the system to use as virtual RAM. I ended up getting a 500 GB drive to replace my 80. Found instructions on ifixit.com and did it myself. Issue was remedied almost immediately. Hope this helps.

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