Declining MacBook Performance?

[ClemTiger0408]

I have an August 2007 MBP.

Obviously, with a 2.5 year old computer, I'd expect that the original processors, etc would not be the fastest on the market. However, recently I've noticed that processes like startup and shutdown have been taking much longer than they used to in the past. Sometimes a full minute to bootup (sitting on the grey apple logo screen with the pinwheel).

I have 4 gigs of ram and a 7200rpm hard drive so I don't know why this would be the case. Also, I completely reformat my drive frequently, like once every 6 or so months. I'm running Snow Leopard.

Any ideas as to what the issue might be? Anything I could try to increase performance?

 

[Gav2k]

When was the last time u blew out the heatsink? If it's overheating it'll throttle the CPU causing ur issue.

 

[cluthz]

I have the same computer as you have, on it's 2.5yr!
It is still as fast as when it was new!
I haven't reformatted it once, except when i upgraded the HD 1.5 yrs ago.
Then i just cloned over the old installation, so I still have the original installation.

Is your HD full?

 

[bmcgrath]

My machine would get sluggish sometimes. I'd run some of the unix maintenance commands, clear boot caches and also re-index spotlight which can help sometimes....