How can I improve my Macbook Pro's performance?

[ReyAA]

I think it's going on 3 and a half years old or so now. If it matters, the Mac is version 10.5.8

It's been getting progressively slower. I'm not tech-savvy in the slightest, so if it's easy enough that I could do it myself, I'd like to know how to improve the overall performance. I don't think it's too old, is it? It's pretty important to me that I keep this laptop in top shape since it was an expensive gift.

I've looked at other help threads and I've gathered that it's usually recommended that those asking for help provide pictures of the Activity Monitor, so I have done so (I think :d)

Thanks in advance. If anything else is necessary, please let me know.

 

[Retina13]

Is it the unibody white macbook or a macbook pro?

And you can upgrade to either 4 or 8 gigs of ram and replace you HD with a SSD

 

[ReyAA]

No, not unibody. Just the regular pro.

So upgrading to SSD and going to 4 GB? That's a little confusing to me. Is that something I could do myself? If so, in what ways does that help?

Thanks

 

[Dwinguel]

If you are going to upgrade the RAM, then you might as well go for 8GB straight away, rather than upgrading to 4GB and to 8GB later. You can buy 2x4GB on this website for example: http://www.macsales.com. But there are others...

Upgrading the SSD is also a good idea. On the same website you can check what you can buy for your model. You need a 2.5" SSD.

Your activity monitor plots show that you had enough RAM at the time you took the screen shots, however 2GB is not a lot these days and I expect that you are running out of memory when you open more applications. Have a look at Activity Monitor when your computer becomes slow and you should see that the pie at the bottom has no green left in it and the number next to "Page ins" should be a significant portion of "Page outs" and going up over time.

The SSD will give you a nice boost in terms of data transfers, that means faster boot up, applications opening quicker, saving and opening files will be faster as well.

That should do the trick.