MBP with OSX 10.4 (tiger) feeling a little sluggish

so recently my MBP had a little bit of a fit that resulted in the battery losing 50 % of its health in just over a day. the battery is just waiting to be replaced so for the mean time, im on mains only

however, since then its been running pretty sluggish for what should be a pretty powerful machin (SR MBP 15.4" 2.4Ghz, 4gig ram, 160gb hdd)

i installed a few new programs, as well as removing some old ones and old files. i installed light room trial which doesnt work at all. sketchup 6 and a virtual DJ. but even before then things seemed different.

the dock seems sticky, expose is juddery, animations arent fluid, scrolling (with my crippled mighty mouse) web pages in FF is almost unbearable (yet isnt so bad in safari or opera). Parallels is now completely hopeless, its so slow, XP is really slow and trying to use solidworks is almost out of the question becuase its just so ****ing slow.

and just now i played a divx video (350mb - 45min) which played less than smoothely (thought it could be a bad file)

what has happened to my mac? how can i fix it? general performance just seems to be down across the board. it couldnt be todo with the battery not being in the machine could it?

SuperCompu2 said:

If you run a MBP off the wall only, the cores slow down to something like 1GHz per core, or so I've heard. The battery supplements the wall charger while the computer runs, so in order to consume less power it runs slower.

This may not be the reason, but it could be compounding other things gone wrong. Have you verified permissions recently?

Click to expand...

i never knew that, anyway to check cpu speeds dynamically? (something like the equiv of CPU-Z for mac?)

that would seem to make sense. anyone got confirmatio of that happening? i have the 85w magsafe so i would presume its more than capable of powering the laptop in full flight though.

i closed a few open programs and windows, not that i had that many anyway. did all the verifying and fixing permissions, i downloaded onyx as well and had it execute all those daily,weekly,monthly maintainence routines and a few other routines.

seems better at least, tho it said i need a restart after i did those things...which i didnt (ill do it later)

animations have become a lot smoother though. the dock and expose are back to normal. do they slow if you have shed loads of stuff open though?

heatmiser said:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305336

Click to expand...

ahh that'll probably explain it then.

ive been using it like normal, parallels on the go (witha gig of ram) running solidworks, firefox with loadsa tabs, movies playing in QT, Entourage and My Day running in the back ground.

explains why that regualr divx file i was watching required over 50% of the CPU at times.

hopefully my battery comes back to me soon!