Early 2008 White Macbook running extremely slow..

[adammusic]

Early 2008 Macbook
OSX Lion 10.7.5
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4gb ram 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

My macbook has been running extremely slow recently during the simplest tasks. Experiencing pausing while typing this out. Mail is a constant beachball. Mail app won't quit normally, needs to be force quit. Safari takes forever to open up. Basically all the simple tasks are extremely bogged down. I can't watch videos in 1080 on youtube. I can't watch anything on Vimeo.

Internet speed is now 180/10.

I verified my hard drive with Disk Utility and everything seems to be ok.
I ran MemTest for my RAM and it passed all the tests.
I did a fresh install of Lion a couple months ago.

Any suggestions on what I can do.

I don't have an SSD installed now. Just a regular hard drive. Would switching to an SSD improve these simple tasks or is basically just time to upgrade completely? I would need an SSD with 500gb capacity if anyone can recommend one. Would i benefit from upgrading to 6gb of ram with this … http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...rue&ref_=ox_sc_act_title_3&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

 

[ApolloBoy]

I just installed an SSD in my 2007 MacBook yesterday and it made a pretty big performance boost, even though it only has SATA I. YouTube still kind of chugs when watching HD video, but that's more because of the CPU and lousy iGPU (mine has the GMA950 which was subpar back then and especially is now). Yours isn't much better than mine spec-wise from what I can tell though. You could try upgrading to 6 GB of RAM as well, but the SSD is what's really gonna make the difference.

 

[BrettApple]

How ironic! I'm posting this from an Early 2008 2.4GHz white MacBook that was brought to me because it was slow. This is the 5th one of the exact same model that I've upgraded in the last year or so. 4GB RAM was put in back when Lion was released but the issue as usual is the slow hard drive. This is the same case as the slow 2012 15" MBP that came in last week. Poor guy had a quad i7, 16GB RAM, 1GB GPU, and it was slow as molasses because of the HDD.

In both cases I've simply installed a new SSD with a clean install of OS X (sometimes I'll clone/Time Machine restore if the OS is still in good shape) and they simply fly now!

If you don't have much data, a 120GB SSD can be had for $49.99 easily now days. Best Buy is selling them for 49.99 right now. Also lots of good deals on Amazon, even a 256GB BX100 can be had for $85 and is well worth it in my opinion if everything else on the Mac is in good order. Yes it's older, yes it's stuck on Lion. But it can still be used on a daily basis. Chrome/Firefox is still up to date, it runs Office 2011, iTunes 12.2, and Adobe CC up to 2014.

 

[Dark Void]

I'd definitely recommend the investment in a SSD. Even a cheaper, small capacity one just for the read/write speeds will help the machine out considerably. If you really need a 500 GB drive, I'd recommend Crucial, specifically the BX100.

 

[Dwayne82]

Beside the really feel-able boost caused by a SSD-drive, this macbook should perform faster as described even with an hdd-drive and Lion installed. this behavior could caused by the following:

- too few free HDD disk space. go to the apple-menu and klick "about this mac" and choose the Harddisk tab. there should at least be 10gb free space for the system to operate somewhere near normal.

- The Harddrive could have a problem. Go to the Disk utility (via spotlight search), choose your system-drive and click on "check volume". if there is a problem with the disk, the utility will tell it to you. follow the steps recommented (mostly you just must click on "repair volume")

- Check and repair the permissions of the system-drive in the disk-utility.

- if none of the steps above helps: One of the ram-module could be defected. to check this, take out one of the ram-modules and start the machine. if the macbook performs well with the one ram-module left, the one you took out is defected. if the macbook doesn't react at all after the removal, remove the ram-module and set in back only the first one. (use ifixit for the step-by-step-removal-guide for your macbook-model) ram is cheap, if one is defected, you should change both of them, check everymac for compatible ram-modules for your device. Choose the maximal possible ram-config for your mac, it's affordable and helps the system to act smoother.

Hope one of these steps helps...

EDIT: sorry for the disk-utility-point, I see now you tested this already