My Mac is Slow!

Tmeels

Tmeels

Active member
Its less than a year old.  Macbook.  Until recently it was great.  Fast online and just doing stuff with photos,word etc.  However now if I click any program I have to sit there and wait for it to open.  It freezes for like 10 second periods with the swirly thing that is like the hour glass.  Constantly does that online (although that may be the connection) Kicks me off I chat sometimes and its just SLOW.  What can I do to fix it?  I emptied the cache which is all I could think of
 
I have the same problem with a Macbook i got last july. I found that on Aim i get kicked off about every 10 min or so but I started using MSN Messenger and it works much better. The other problems i havnt figured out yet tho. Good luck
 
depending on when you got it, it probobly only has 512 megs of ram. that would be a great place to start.....buy yourself like 2 gigs of memory. you can get 2 gig sticks for like $50 and they're SUPER easy to put in. 2 gigs is the max for macbooks, so don't go buy like 2 2 gig sticks and think that you can run both.

also, i don't know if you've been a mac user for a long time, but i've seen people do this a lot....make sure you are exiting your programs and not just closing the window. actually go to the drop down at the top of the screen and click "exit", don't just click the little red x. seems retarded, but i've seen soooo many people do this. you don't want multiple applications running at once. you could also just use apple + q to quit programs faster.

get random shit off of your desktop. you shouldn't have any more than 10 icons. and keep your dock small, with as few icons as possible. just get rid of icons and use spotlight all the time.

go through your applications folder and delete random shit you don't use.
 
go to your utilities and open up DISK UTILITY. Then select your man drive and repair your permissions. This fixes 85% of my problems.

I repair my permissions about 3 times a week to keep things in order.
 
Repair permissions on your drive will help alot!

Go into application folder -> Untilites -> open Disk Utility

Once in disk utility click on the name of your Hard drive, probably "Hard Drive" Or "Macintosh HD".. Something like that.

Then go to the first aid tab, opens in this window anyway, but just incase.

Then 'Verify Disk Permission" and follow that by "Repair Disk Permissions" Repeat this a couple times and your set.

Let me know how is goes.
 
Also, how full is your hard drive. If its getting up there, consider going through it and emptying out what you don't need.
 
what does the fullness of your harddrive have to do with speed?

if i were you i would burn all the shit u've got, and reformat your harddrive, which whipes out all the files and programs off of your computer. basically it'll be just like u got it brand new. then put all the stuff u need back on. if you need faster or something, definately go buy some ram.
 
Got mine in April and it's in the same boat...ran fast until recently when I'm online I'll get the swirling thing every now and then. I use Adium, so I have no instant messaging problems.
 
the fullness of your hard drive has a LOT to do with speed. i have one of the first dells to come out with windows xp (from like 2000ish) and it has an 18.6 gig hard drive. for a while i would constantly get messages telling me if i didnt clean it my computer it would crash and stuff. programs run much slower than, music in itunes skips, aim fucks up all the time, etc. i got an external hard drive and almost all the problems are solved, except i only have a usb1.0 drive which makes it hard to run programs off the external.

theyre also selling dell "vostro" desktops for like $450 with 2 gigs of ram, 180 gig hard drives, and windows xp (since vista was such a flop). i got one and its amazing.

also i was really surprised by this thread because i hear nothing but good thins about macs.
 
Thanks for the suggestions guys, I did all the stuff you suggested and it did little to nothing.  I guess I can feel a little difference but its not enough for me to be satisfied.  I guess I can attribute it to having 4 full length ski movies saved on the HD?
 
^Can you give me specs of your system.

Processor Speed

Operating system

Capacity of Harddrive/ space left

Ram

ect.

Also, have you ran a system update recently? If not, do one and see what needs to be updated.
 


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Epic.
 
Fullness technically has nothing to do with speed. An empty hard drive will perform the same as a half or 3/4 full hard drive.

A full hard drive can only effect speed when theres no room for virtual memory. I'm not entirely sure how OS X does it, but I believe the space for swapping memory is already allocated and filling your hard drive won't affect it. Some programs write stuff to the hard drive while they're running, which could cause some problems but in most cases the program will crash before it can do anything to the OS.

Unless your hard drive is FULL, like less than a few hundred megabytes the problem is most likely something else. Reinstalling the OS is the easiest fix. Its pretty easy to do also. Just make sure you back everything up that you want to keep because everything will be erased.
 
try turning ot off every once in a while. A lot of people don't let their computers shut down, that helps sometimes.
 
Im such a noob.. where the hell is my application folder.. Is it the applications under places on my HD? If so I cant find any utilities.. Im also on a version 10.5.3 so maybe its different? or Im just dumb..
 
click the little magnifying glass thing in the top right of your screen and search for DISK UTILITY
haha
 
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