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Help with MacBook performance

NDimichino

NDimichino

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 14, 2008
593
0
New Jersey
I have a year-and-a-half old MacBook and in the past month or so, the browser speed has been awfully sluggish. Is there any kind of regular maintenance or clean-out process I can do to speed up browsing and the overall performance in all applications? Everything seems to be a tad slow.

Thanks.
 
Well have you thought about adding more ram to your computer? My upgraded to 2GB of ram, and my friends old macbook that was running tiger had less than a gig, so we upped her RAM to 1GB and it was instantly faster and more responsive. Then we also installed leopard which has a bunch of nice improvements. I would try something like that.
 
Might be a long shot but try deleting all the saved wireless connections. Each time you connect to a WAP the settings are stored. My brother in law came down this summer and was complaining about the same thing. His was slow on the web but fine when browsing locally stored files. Since I'm the network engineer of the family he immediately brought it to my attention. Once I removed the stored connections it was blazing through web pages again. I'm not a pro with Mac but it worked in his situation.
 
Adding more RAM wont speed up your internet browsing, however its possible your computers just slowed down with bloatware, is there any other applications other than Safari and Firefox using the internet connection? Computer updating?? Also you should try updating Firefox to the newest version.
 
StLCards said:
Might be a long shot but try deleting all the saved wireless connections. Each time you connect to a WAP the settings are stored. My brother in law came down this summer and was complaining about the same thing. His was slow on the web but fine when browsing locally stored files. Since I'm the network engineer of the family he immediately brought it to my attention. Once I removed the stored connections it was blazing through web pages again. I'm not a pro with Mac but it worked in his situation.
Click to expand...

I had about 15 extra saved networks that I don't need, so I cleared that out. Nothing has improved. I don't know if it's actually getting worse or I'm just focusing on it now, but it seems to be slower than when I started this thread.

I tried Firefox again, just as slow.

For example: When I type in "forums.macrumors.com" and hit enter, it's taking about 20 seconds to load the page, one that doesn't have flash, barely has any graphic, or really anything other than text.

I have iChat open, and Mail. I have tried restarting my computer and opening just Safari/Firefox and there was no difference so I opened iChat and Mail back up.

I cleared the cache and history from Safari, deleted all my downloaded files and emptied my Trash. I'm really sort of stumped.
 
StLCards said:
Once I removed the stored connections it was blazing through web pages again. I'm not a pro with Mac but it worked in his situation.
Click to expand...

where does one find these "stored connections"

thanks
 
bozz2006 said:
applications -> utilities -> disk utility -> repair permissions
Click to expand...

Thanks, it definitely seemed to work at first, but I think it was because I was visiting macrumors for the millionth time tonight. Other sites are still taking forever. I don't get it.
 
open activity monitor. check to make sure there aren't any programs that are hogging your CPU. is it JUST internet that is slow, or are other programs slow too? if it is just slow browsing, i'd have to guess that the problem is with your network, not your computer.
 
bozz2006 said:
open activity monitor. check to make sure there aren't any programs that are hogging your CPU. is it JUST internet that is slow, or are other programs slow too? if it is just slow browsing, i'd have to guess that the problem is with your network, not your computer.
Click to expand...

Okay, according to that, my computer is between 95 and 99 percent idle.
 
You said it takes 10-15 seconds for the page to load. Do you mean completely load or just to respond? It COULD be a slow DNS response from your ISP. For the hell of it goto www.opendns.org and try out their DNS servers. They are really quick. If not, have you reset Safari? (Safari menu, reset Safari)
 
jmann4489 said:
Which is why is suggested add more RAM. ;) How much do you currently have installed?
Click to expand...

I'm wondering the same thing. If you have less than 2 GB I'd most definitely suggest upgrading. I have 4gb in my new MB, and it won't even slow down when I'm running XP with Fusion, Mail, iCal, Word, iTunes, and surfing the internet with Firefox & multiple tabs open.
 
It is also possible that your hard disk might be getting full. I think that if a hard disk fills beyond half of its capacity overall performance will degrade. How much free space do you have left?
 
Yes, check how much HDD space you have. Although "half its capacity" is overstating it. Make sure you have at least 10GB free.

But also check your network speed by bypassing the browser. Open Network Utility, select Ping, and enter www.macrumors.com.

If that's slow (I get a response time of about 50ms), then it's not your browser that's causing the problem.

You could try modifying your DNS servers to the OpenDNS hosts.
 
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