Slowwwww

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Level 1

0 points

Slowwwww

I really don't know where to start. And bare with me as this is my first post on here I've had my MacBook for about 5 years now. Never had any hardware or software problems that I couldn't fix myself. Yesterday I installed Parallels 8 and then Windows 7 on that just in order to play the Sims on my Mac. Ridiculous,. I know. My hard disk space was getting dangerously full, so I went ahead and deleted ~30 GB of junk. Mostly pictures and videos, but also some random huge files I found in finder. I made sure the files hadn't been in use. The ones I deleted hadn't been opened in years, so I didn't think anything of it. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell you what the files were. Finished installing the Sims. Closed my laptop for the night and opened it up the next day. Slow as molasses. Finder, Firefox, and Safari (if/when they even open) freeze immediately or when asked to do a task. Rainbow wheel forever. Try never crash, just keep spinning. They all will force quit only. Those three apps are basically unusable.

I ran an antivirus scan. Found one potential threat. Deleted it, but it seemed like something that would be harmful to windows, not Mac.

Ran Disk Utility.. Repaired permissions and even repaired disk which took 2 hours. But everything went fine.

Turned laptop off and on multiple times.

Tried to restart in recovery mode but much to my dismay, I don't have a recovery hd partition!

Tried to reinstall Mountain Lion, alas it says to clean my disc EVEN THOUGH I'VE ONLY USED IT ONCE AND IT STAYS IN ITS PLASTIC WRAPPER! Ugh can you tell I'm fed up?

Uninstalled Parallels and everything with it. Uninstalled Firefox..

I have plenty of free space on my hard drive. I am at loss as to why its running so slow.

Also my Activity Manager has never worked (never opens and just freezes) so I have mo idea what's going on with my CPU.

Let me know what else you guys need to know.

This is the time where having am external hard drive for time machine would really help.

Thanks.

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Jul 18, 2013 8:09 PM

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Answer 1

dalstott

Level 4

2,639 points

Jul 19, 2013 9:16 AM in response to gegx3

There have been a number of complaints about 10.8 running slow since the introduction. I would imagine that the older machines have a higher incidence of this problem. My solution was not to go beyond 10,7 since there was not any features of 10.8 that I wanted or needed. I would suggest you go back to 10.6.8 then upgrade to 10.7 (you need to call apple store in order to get a download code) and leave it there.

https://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?peopleEnabled=true&userID=&containerTy pe=&container=&spotlight=false&q=10.8+slow

Consider backup on an external USB HDD withTime Machine or better yet a bootable clone to protect yourself in the future. You can use a bootable clone as a guinea pig for updates and OSX upgrades without the risk of screwing up your main HDD.

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Answer 2

kostby

Level 4

2,964 points

Jul 19, 2013 10:04 AM in response to gegx3

Welcome to Apple Support Communities. We're all users here.

You didn't mention how much RAM memory is installed in your system.

Adequate free RAM memory is crucial to overall system performance, because when the OS runs out of memory it swaps some memory contents out to the hard disk, an operation far, far slower than writing directly to RAM, often slowing system performance to a crawl.

OS X 10.6 runs OK in 2GB, but better with more. My mid-2007 MacBook holds 4GB, though because of the system design, only 3GB is actually available for system use. So even though TECHNICALLY, I could run OS X 10.7, I stopped at OS X 10.6 to keep performance at an acceptable level.

Minimum system specifications aside, my understanding is that OS X 10.7 and 10.8 NEED 4GB for adequate performance, and if your system can handle it, more is better.

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