3 Year Old Macbook; Slow all the Sudden?

[longball11]

I have a 3 year old Black Macbook from 2007. It is my first mac. It has been speedy for these three years. Im on it after watching porn admittedly, and all the video sites like youtube, metacafe, espn highlights in articles, all stutter or pauses throughout the video even though it's fully loaded. Sometimes it will just freeze. And when these instances occur, the mouse pointer is freezes, the volume buttons freeze and the volume mutes automatically. It's never really happened to the macbook before and the internet signal is strong as usual. It slows everything down when these situations happen.
I usually close safari and then reset safari. I also tried opening iTunes, and it just bounced for a long time. Finally said there was a problem opening it and asking to report it to Apple.
I am starting to freak out that my macbook is starting to turn out like my damn dell. It got all messed up after 3 years and threw it out bc of viruses.
What do I do?!....I learned my lesson as well....the porn...has gotta go.

 

[wordoflife]

Flash content takes a lot of processing power which your Macbook might not be able to handle which causes it to slow down. Run another video and see how much CPU usage you get. I bet its pretty high.

you can't really do anything about that because thats just hardware limitations.

 

[longball11]

Flash content takes a lot of processing power which your Macbook might not be able to handle which causes it to slow down. Run another video and see how much CPU usage you get. I bet its pretty high.

you can't really do anything about that because thats just hardware limitations.

Man. I went to youtube. Clicked on a video and couldn't even get to the clip. I dont much about the CPU but the Disk activity was peaking like crazy. As I type this, iTunes opened when I didn't even click to open it. By the way, some other things are making it worse. I used headphones to listen to music. The headphones were plugged in and the sound was going through the speakers not the headphones. Now, without the headphones plugged in, the volume icon at the top right, is grey instead of black. I can't use it. I try pressing the volume buttons on the keyboard and it wont work. It'll just show that's it not operable. WTF is going on, I am about to FREAK!

 

[pvmacguy]

Any liquid spills? From what is happening that's what it sounds like especially with the inconsistent volume controls, headphone port. Hace you ever done any upgrades? What are the specs of your machine?

Also I would backup all your information on it while it's still functioning somewhat and reformat and re-install the os.

 

[alust2013]

Flash content takes a lot of processing power which your Macbook might not be able to handle which causes it to slow down. Run another video and see how much CPU usage you get. I bet its pretty high.

you can't really do anything about that because thats just hardware limitations.

Any MacBook has plenty of hardware capability to run flash content though

 

[longball11]

Any liquid spills? From what is happening that's what it sounds like especially with the inconsistent volume controls, headphone port. Hace you ever done any upgrades? What are the specs of your machine?

Also I would backup all your information on it while it's still functioning somewhat and reformat and re-install the os.

I'm barely able to get to any websites now. It's 2007 black macbook. 2.2 gHz. 2 GB RAM. 160 GB hard drive. x3100 GMA graphics. I know ridiculous.

I installed Snow Leopard on this computer about month or two ago. And microsoft office 2008 about year and a half ago. I thought porn might have done this. There wasnt any pop ups though. I wouldnt have said 'yes' or 'install' or fall for anything like that anyway.

 

[longball11]

Also iTunes and Safari are crashing constantly. I am able to get around in safari here and there.

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

Do you have a TimeMachine backup? You could restore to a point before the porn you think caused it. To be honest, I kind of doubt it's the porn since, while they're notorious for giving you viruses and all kinds of crap, it's all Windows stuff.

A 2.2 GHz C2D MacBook should run Flash just fine. I have the same computer (exact same specs, for now) and when I run Flash I never see more than 50% usage on both cores. Installing MenuMeters is a great way to see what your computer is doing when.

 

[dh2005]

A three-year old laptop suddenly slowing down makes me think of a dying hard drive.

Extreme disk activity could be what's known as 'disk thrashing'. As I understand it, it's the beginning of a cyclical decline that inevitably results in hard drive failure - the damaged drive can't transfer as much data per unit time, which forces the drive to undertake more cycles to get each task done, which stresses the drive and causes further damage, slowing the drive further etc. until it's completely broken.

Magnetic drives don't like being moved while they're running. Plus, the reliability of all hard drives isn't what it used to be. Three years isn't a bad innings for a laptop hard drive these days, dependent on usage.


Make backing-up anything important (other than your porn) your first priority. There's every chance that that computer's about to die.

 

[longball11]

I shut my macbook down for the night and turned it on this morning. It seemed back to normal and fine. I could listen to music and watch videos fully loaded without pauses, stuttering, etc. The webpages are opening like normal, speedy, etc.
I don't know what the hell happened last night. It was the first time my computer was acting up like that in the three years I've had it. It makes me suspicious and wonder if there is any worms, malware, spyware, etc on this computer now.

 

[chadua]

I shut my macbook down for the night and turned it on this morning. It seemed back to normal and fine. I could listen to music and watch videos fully loaded without pauses, stuttering, etc. The webpages are opening like normal, speedy, etc.
I don't know what the hell happened last night. It was the first time my computer was acting up like that in the three years I've had it. It makes me suspicious and wonder if there is any worms, malware, spyware, etc on this computer now.

I'd be more worried about a hardware failure like the hard drive problem mentioned above. You should probably at least check in disc utility if there is a warning next to the S.M.A.R.T. status. I'd definitely back up everything important at this point though.

 

[longball11]

I'd be more worried about a hardware failure like the hard drive problem mentioned above. You should probably at least check in disc utility if there is a warning next to the S.M.A.R.T. status. I'd definitely back up everything important at this point though.

I'm unsure how to do that. Are you talking about 'Console'? I open up utilities and see disk utilities but don't see much on there. I go back one page and see that there is Console which has an image with old styled letters saying 'warning'.

 

[chadua]

I'm unsure how to do that. Are you talking about 'Console'? I open up utilities and see disk utilities but don't see much on there. I go back one page and see that there is Console which has an image with old styled letters saying 'warning'.

http://www.ehow.com/how_2091894_check-macs-smart-status.html

 

[dh2005]

I shut my macbook down for the night and turned it on this morning. It seemed back to normal and fine. I could listen to music and watch videos fully loaded without pauses, stuttering, etc. The webpages are opening like normal, speedy, etc.
I don't know what the hell happened last night. It was the first time my computer was acting up like that in the three years I've had it.

Computers aren't organic creatures, mate; they're machines. They don't just 'have a bad day', then get better. Whatever the problem it had yesterday, it still has it today; even if you can't see it. If it's malware, it's still there and you need to remove it. If it's a hardware fault, it could kill your machine at any moment (and you should feel grateful that it's given you a warning - I've lost hard drives out of nowhere, in the past).

Back-up that hard drive, now.

 

[kuwisdelu]

1. How full is your hard drive?

2a. Open Disk Utility, as suggested, choose your drive on the left. Do a "Repair Disk Permissions" and "Verify Disk."

2b. If "Verify Disk" gets errors, boot from your SL install DVD by holding "c" during the boot, and from the menu bar choose Utilities -> Disk Utility again and do a "Repair Disk."

3. I agree it sounds like a failing hard drive. Regardless of whether anything in (2) works, get an external and do a backup using Time Machine or a other backup utility of your choice. Consider installing a new hard drive.

 

[.JahJahwarrior.]

I'm having a similar issue. Harddrive is less than a year old. Computer randomly freezes for a second or two. Music playing (Pandora) or video on VLC will skip, sometimes the audio doesn' t come back right, it might keep skipping or sound distorted. Mouse moves jumpily, and text I type doesn't get put in.

A restart didn't fix it, I'm going to try the harddrive stuff you all reccomended. I have a TM backup thankfully