Really Slow MacBook Air

[AdamA9]

Guys, need some help. I've a first revision macbook air here, that's suddenly grind down to a really slow and sluggish machine.

How can I find out what is slowing it down, and more importantly, how can I speed it up again? What information do you need to diagnose any problems with the computer?

It's the original 1.6GHz C2D with 2GB 667MHz DDR2

The Activity monitor is saying that Safari is using 1.2GB virtual memory, as is Mail, which I'm sure has not always been the case, however, even with these shut it's still really slow.

Thanks for any help.
Adam

 

[stridemat]

Have you tried SMC and PRAM resets?

 

[jaykk]

My Rev A MBA did same thing yesterday, i used Onyx app to clean up the system. The system is much responsive now.

The key is to repair permission and clean up the logs. didn't try PRAM settings though.

 

[AdamA9]

Have you tried SMC and PRAM resets?

I haven't tried anything yet, but thanks for the reply. How would I go about doing this?

 

[halledise]

I haven't tried anything yet, but thanks for the reply. How would I go about doing this?

SMC reset.
Air off.
power cord in.
hold down shift + control + option and press power button once.
wait for a slow 5 count then start normally

PRAM zap

hold down command + option + p + r as it starts up and wait to hear the chime repeated 3 times.

let go and Air should start normally.

if that don't improve things, start up from your install disc (having backed up your stuff) and either reinstall OS 10.6 or (what I'd do) erase and install then add back in your apps and home folder.

the latter will give you your original snappy machine.

update Software via SW Update

 

[sevimli]

similar thing happened to me and bam, 2 days later i lost my hdd

now i have runcore ssd, very pleased with that!

 

[halledise]

I haven't tried anything yet, but thanks for the reply. How would I go about doing this?

if sevimli is right regarding your machine - back up now just in case your HDD might **** itself

 

[AdamA9]

similar thing happened to me and bam, 2 days later i lost my hdd

now i have runcore ssd, very pleased with that!

What, after doing the PRAM and SMC reset or just when it slowed right down?

 

[AdamA9]

I've tried that and it doesn't seem to have made too much difference. How do I know if the SMC reset was successful? No noises went off, just about to try the PRAM now...

 

[AdamA9]

Guys,

Sorry to trouble again, but this seemed to help for about a day or so, and now it's gone back to an almost un-useable machine.

The beachball just spins and spins, particularily when using Safari or Mail. I don't want to have to keep doing this every other day to keep it running.

Do I have any other options? Annoyingly it's about 2 months outside the 3 years for Apple Care too... Typical...

 

[stridemat]

It does seem like the hard drive is on its last legs. Do you have an old external you could try in its place?

 

[McDughf]

Mate, I've got a Rev B Machine and about a month ago it started acting a bit funny ( incorrect permissions and all really made the whole OS grind to a halt)
In the end i just did a repair install off of the Snow Leopard discs and everything is running FANtastically well.

 

[AdamA9]

We have a TC backing up but that's about it for external HD.

I was thinking about getting her Snow Leopard, and then installing that, however, we're worried about losing data from the Laptop.

Could we do a full backup onto the TC, and then when we run the snow Leopard disk create from backup and use the data on the TC?

 

[stridemat]

If you want to upgrade to SL then make a full backup of your current machine on TM. Carryout a clean install with SL and then restore from backup.

Easy as pie!

 

[AdamA9]

If you want to upgrade to SL then make a full backup of your current machine on TM. Carryout a clean install with SL and then restore from backup.

Easy as pie!

Thanks, went to Apple and they said to bring in the MBA first so they can check it out to make sure we don't waste money on SL if the computer is fried! Kind of annoyed because it's JUST outside the 3 year Apple Care. Still, might try get them on the Sale of Goods Act

 

[VS007]

Same issue with my RevA. It got worse after 10.6.4.

I had called Apple Support,cleaned up cache, file permissions and even did the PRAM reset, SMC reset, still spinning beach balls, ultimately narrowed down to my user id.
Created a new user id and it became responsive again, though it got sluggish over last few weeks, still usable.

Now I keep all my music,video in one user id and use another one just for browsing.

 

[is2myMBA]

similar thing happened to me and bam, 2 days later i lost my hdd

now i have runcore ssd, very pleased with that!

When you installed your runcore ssd, did you need a superdrive to go about installing the os?

 

[AdamA9]

Just booked into the Apple store for it to be looked at Thursday - I got my dates wrong (I think) and I'm sure I've got Apple Care still so going to get them to take a look at it!

Annoyingly the past day it's started behaving again GRRR! I hope it messes up again so I can get it fixed!

 

[osiris24x]

First place I always check is the console log for "disk i/o errors", a sign of a dying hard drive. Second place I check is CPU usage across all processes.

Good luck!

 

[VS007]

I see stdout Input/Output Error

 

[AdamA9]

Just a quick update, turns out it was the logic board that had gone funny! We got it replaced under warranty and it's all working fine now!

Thanks for all the help

 

[bowlerman625]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A400 Safari/6531.22.7)

I noticed my 10 month MacBook Air with SSD had slowed down considerably on start and shutdown. I worked with apple support and wound up reloading OS X. Now things are good again! And fast like the original speeds.

 

[VS007]

Update

Took my MBC to Apple few days back and they confirmed a disk issue.
I got the hard disk replaced today and am happy to report my MBA is snappy like a new one and the OS is 10.6.3 and have no plans to update to 10.6.4.

 

[ScottFitz]

I'll get my Rev A back tomorrow. Took it in for the loose hinge issue (had a known fix for that) and the slow down. I'll report back tomorrow. Hopefully, all is well.

 

[drvelocity]

THIS WORKED: For anyone coming to this thread via Google, I have a 2011 Macbook Air that was ridiculously slow after an accidental complete battery rundown, showing sub 2000 geek bench scores (instead of about 6000 where it should be). An SMC reset fixed this, I'm at 5900 now and the computer feels three times as fast.