Increasing Macbook speeds

[esvienne]

Hi there... I've had my macbook for a few months now. I have the 2.2 Santa-Rosa 1GB platform. I checked the forum for threads regarding this but I haven't found any. I manually searched as well as did the auto search form my title...

Anyways, I haven't installed much of anything on here (just the adobe suite, because I use Illustrator and photoshop) and I have alot of pictures. I've only used 30 GBs.. I have 107 remaining.

Does anybody know of anything I can do (without increasing the hard drive space or putting in more memory) to help my computer work a little better? It's slowed down significantly lately with starting up and starting programs.. for really no reason at all. I didn't know if there were any tricks regarding background processes, or settings that I can adjust maybe to tweak the performance. I come from windows, so I'm really used to fixing problems on windows laptops, but I'm not to macs, so any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!!

 

[EricNau]

You could try repairing permissions:

Go to your Applications Folder > Utilities > Disk Utility, select your HDD, and select "repair permissions."

 

[techound1]

Do a permissions repair in disk utility. [edit: eric beat me to it!]

Consider getting copies of Disk Warrior and Drive Genius - both well respected programs to help clean out the spinning beach ball.

 

[CWallace]

Going to 2GB of RAM might also help.

 

[esvienne]

thanks for the quick replies! I did verify and repair the permissions, I usually do that regularly. I'll try to get a copy of drive genius... is it shareware? freeware? Does it work somewhat like the disc cleanup on windows?

 

[26139]

uh...

Won't upgrading from a gig of ram be most beneficial? Can't be more than $60.

 

[esvienne]

yes increasing to more ram would definitely help the problem, but for the time being I only do school work and light photo editing. Maybe I phrased my question wrong. In the past week or two, there's been a definite decline in performance, and it's not attributed to hogging hard drive space or using too much virtual memory.. I'm trying to figure out a solution that can help it in its current state rather than just ignoring and running away from the problem by increasing to more ram. That way I can assess if there's something wrong, since I haven't really used more memory or ran more than two applications at one time.

example- I've heard that occasionally when you use the printer, the process will still continue running even after you've closed the printer icon on the dock etc. I was just curious if there were things like that, which could be adding to my slowness.

Thanks for the ram suggest though- I'll probably end up doing that eventually anyway