2008 Macbook slowing to a halt. Hard drive problem?

[davidinva]

I have been having problems with my Macbook (2008, 2.4, 2GB, 160GB HDD) slowing down to a stop. I repair permissions and get 1-3 hrs of normal performance when it happens again. I have a Snow Leopard DVD (10.6.3) and have restarted from that and seem to get normal performance (that's what I'm using now to be on the forum). My system profiler, however shows 10.6.8, but I can use the computer without the slowdown problems (at least for the last 30 minutes).

What's happening here? I have recent posts here and have checked Activity Monitor, etc. Nothing looks out of the ordinary. While writing this post, I opened Photoshop Elements 10 and had no problems.

Hard drive going bad? And, can I make a DVD for startup purposed of 10.6.8?

 

[davidinva]

Record for nonresponse? Update.

I may be setting a record for non-response. I think part of the problem is the way I write.

Simple (?) version:

Hard drive slowing down to a crawl. Fixing permissions results in normal performance for anywhere from an hour to 3-4 hrs.

Have a SL disk for 10.6.3. Installed that on an external drive. Restarted from that drive and updated the external to 10.6.8. Used SuperDuper to clone the Macbook hard drive to the external. Macbook runs fine from that drive and now seems to be ok when I switch back to the internal drive. Apparently, I didn't clone my problems. Haven't erased the Macbook drive yet.

So, that is my current status. Thanks for reading my post.

 

[GGJstudios]

Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes", then click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top). Then look to see what may be consuming system resources. Also click on the System Memory tab at the bottom and check to see if your "Page outs" are significant (say 1GB or more).

Performance tips for Mac OS X

 

[Sonhascome]

could definitely be the hard drive