Q: I have been using macbook pro for the last 3 years now. And it has become really slow for past couple of months. How can I fix it?

Pageouts are never good, usually mean you need to upgrade your RAM rather than perform system maintenance. Pageouts will mess up your HDD over time as it is being used as a scratch disk instead of your RAM.

  160 KB             Page-outs

Get rid of Paragon.

Mac's run daily/weekly/monthly scripts to for system maintenance, but additional maintenance can be performed to clear out HDD space and the like.

I recommend Onyx software for maintenance,

or community member:Kappy's Personal Suggestions About OS X Maintenance

My #1 suggestion to you would be to upgrade your RAM. 2 GB doesn't cut it anymore, even with 10.6

The pageouts are the reason your computer is running really slow.

Software that comes with Seagate are usually trouble.

If you are using an older version of Paragon NTFS then you do need to update. There is nothing wrong and in fact paragon NTFS which I use is the best NTFS driver so nothing wrong and they have good support for Macs, for Windows on Mac. Get ride of? seems unfounded. MacFuse and others, replace with Paragon-Software.

4GB is to me and I think if you look at what Apple ships now, at least that much. See if www.macsales.com/memory has upgrade

(I do not and would not touch Onyx)

Notebook?

MacBook Series Forums
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks?view=discussions
http://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro 

Onyx, look at the comments and what is fixed ("improved") but Onyx has been wrecking some users systems in 10.8.4. I always read the "what's new" and that is one reason I don't use or install it.

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx

General purpose Mac troubleshooting guide:

Mac OS X: Starting up in Safe Mode - http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107393

What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? (Mac OS X) - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1564

Isolating issues in Mac OS X

Creating a temporary user to isolate user-specific problems:

Isolating an issue by using another user account

Identifying resource hogs and other tips:

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used

Starting the computer in "safe mode":

Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode?

To identify potential hardware problems:

Apple Hardware Test

General Mac maintenance:

How to install OS X on a new or faulty HD without Internet recovery

Corrupt and new disks might not have a working Recovery partition, but there are still ways to access one and reinstall OS X, if needed.

+1 for this info. The reviews are mixed, the overall is great, but it seems there may be an issue since 10.8.4. Atleast with Onyx, it actually tells the user what he/she is going to execute. It comes with a full help guide explaining every option, and warning users about certain options. Given the resources at hand, it is the responsibility of the user to know what they are executing when they do it. By the same token, I agree that it is the responsibility of the developer to not screw up a user's machine with deprecated software.Thanks for this information.

cruca

ua16 wrote:

 

I read somewhere that I should use etrecheck and post its contents to know what could be the problem.

It helps as we can take a look at known issues that can cause problems.

It's not really complete, but he's working on improving it.

Hardware Information:

          MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009)

          MacBook Pro - model: MacBookPro5,5

          1 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU: 2 cores

          2 GB RAM

Crucial.com install it yourself.

Install/upgrade RAM or storage drive in Mac's

Startup Items:

          CUDA - Path: /System/Library/StartupItems/CUDA

Check for updates to CUDA from Nvidia or the software that installed it.

This may be causing performance issues, I don't know.

Disk Information:

          ST9160314ASG disk0 : (149.05 GB)

                    (null) (disk0s1) <not mounted>: 200 MB

                    Macintosh HD (disk0s2) /: 148.73 GB (35.15 GB free)

Your about 75% filled on your boot hard drive, your performance is going to suffer more as it's filled up more past this point. Ideally a boot hard drive should be only 50% filled and all the data on the first 50% of the drive for best performance.

I do this by partitioning my boot hard drive 50/50, then only storing rarely used user data (like large movies) on the second partition.

If you have TimeMachine, it's creating a hidden TMlocal backup file that is taking room and thus forcing your new writes to occur to the absolutely slowest parts of your boot drive. So it's better to reduce your items on the boot drive so you stay further away from the really slow last 25% of the drive.

You may want to think about upgrading your internal storage to a 7,200 RPM larger boot hard drive, a SSD is a waste of money for your SATA III connections and that the machine is a bit dated so it's not worth spending that kind of money on a large SSD. If you do a SSD, remmeber Snow Leopard is not used to it and you have to enable TRIM yourself.

http://www.mactrast.com/2011/07/how-to-enable-trim-support-for-all-ssds-in-os-x- lion/

You can fix your machine of any issues, reduce items to 50% filled and then do a defrag + OnyX cache cleaning, it speeds things up quite a bit.

..Step by Step to fix your Mac

How to safely defrag a Mac's hard drive

Kernel Extensions:

          com.rim.driver.BlackBerryUSBDriverInt          (0.0.74)

          com.logmein.driver.LogMeInSoundDriver          (1.0.0)

          com.nvidia.CUDA          (1.1.0)

          com.seagate.driver.PowSecDriverCore          (5.2.2)

          com.seagate.driver.PowSecLeafDriver_10_5          (5.2.2)

          com.paragon-software.filesystems.ntfs          (95)

Some at boot kernel extension files, these load when the machine boots and can cause Gray Screen issues if not updated or removed if no longer needed.

Use the developers upgrader or uninstaller also to check all these if you really need them or not.

A problem with this sort of software is that if you ever need to fix OS X in #8 Step here: ..Step by Step to fix your Mac

To install OS X over itself to fix it's problem, this sort of software gets kicked out of OS X and then you may not be able to install it again unless you upgrade OS X to a later verison, which you lose your PPC apps and perhaps need a newer/faster machine.

So it's important to learn how to create a bootable clone your OS X boot volume so you can reverse clone your software problems away and thus continue using the older software you can't install fresh anymore.

Most commonly used backup methods

Also your using Paragon 3G NTFS as you likely have a external Windows NTFS formatted drive. If you using this software to recover files off Windows PC's internal boot drive, then go right ahead and ignore.

However if you have a NTFS formatted external drive and using it to share files with PC's, your better off taking all the data off and formatting exFAT on the oldest Windows PC (for XP exFAT upgrade from Microsoft online) so that way it's a really good cross platform format that accepts +4GB sized files and doesn't require paid software upgrades and the possibility of dropping support for Snow Leopard.

Do not format exFAT on the Mac, it doesn't do it right and Windows has a hard time reading it.

Only OS X 10.6.5 and up can do exFAT. So if you ever have to reinstall OS X fresh, remmeber to Software Update to 10.6.8 first before connecting a exFAT drive.

Launch Daemons:

          [loaded] com.adobe.fpsaud.plist (Flash)

          [loaded] com.adobe.SwitchBoard.plist

          [loaded] com.google.keystone.daemon.plist

          [not loaded] com.logmein.logmeinserver.plist

          [loaded] com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper.plist

          [loaded] com.rim.BBDaemon.plist

 

Launch Agents:

          [not loaded] com.adobe.AAM.Updater-1.0.plist

          [loaded] com.google.keystone.agent.plist

          [loaded] com.logmein.logmeingui.plist

          [not loaded] com.logmein.logmeinguiagent.plist

          [not loaded] com.logmein.logmeinguiagentatlogin.plist

          [loaded] com.nvidia.CUDASoftwareUpdate.plist

          [loaded] com.rim.BBAlbumArtCacher.plist

          [loaded] com.rim.BBLaunchAgent.plist

          [loaded] com.seagate.SeagateStorageGauge.plist

 

User Launch Agents:

          [loaded] com.adobe.AAM.Updater-1.0.plist

          [loaded] com.adobe.ARM.df0ab5bbe6f698196fcc21e3c1e66dcb758bd911f4d637272d9d8109.plist

          [loaded] com.codecm.uploader.plist

 

 

User Login Items:

          iTunesHelper

          LogMeIn

          Dropbox

 

3rd Party Preference Panes:

          CUDA Preferences

          Flash Player

          Paragon NTFS for Mac ® OS X

 

Internet Plug-ins:

          AdobeAAMDetect.plugin

          AdobePDFViewer.plugin

          Flash Player.plugin

          FlashPlayer-10.6.plugin

          googletalkbrowserplugin.plugin

          iPhotoPhotocast.plugin

          JavaAppletPlugin.plugin

          LogMeIn.plugin

          LogMeInSafari32.plugin

          LogMeInSafari64.plugin

          npgtpo3dautoplugin.plugin

          o1dbrowserplugin.plugin

          QuickTime Plugin.plugin

          SharePointBrowserPlugin.plugin

          Silverlight.plugin

 

User Internet Plug-ins:

          Picasa.plugin

Check that all your software and browser plugins are updated. (ignore quicktime)

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/plugincheck/

Disable Java plugin in all your browsers, use only on sites you trust. It's been a security nightmare.

If your not using any Java based programs on your Mac, then also disable it in Java Preferences.

What I see as your chief problems is not enough RAM to cover open programs, thus extra memory is being "swapped" onto the boot hard drive which is likely getting full and reducing your read/write performance.

You likely have some clogged caches which the #12 OnyX routine will assist.

..Step by Step to fix your Mac

Why is my computer slow?

Other than that, I think your looking pretty good, unless your having other issues.

I do not recommend 10.7 or later for that machine due to slower performance, breaking of PPC based software, requiring all new upgraded versions for a older machine and the possibility of a firmware bricking the machine with no AppleCare to bail your out.

http://roaringapps.com/apps:table

Plan on buying a new 10.9 machine or next years machine. 10.6 has 25% OS X version market share still and getting updates, but likely once 10.9 is released??? Might not be anymore, like Apple has done in the past, just leaves many users hanging with no security updates. Use Firefox or Chrome as it's getting more recent and frequent updates.

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222