mac os 10.6 becoming slower and slower

[steveca]

Hi. I have a macbook pro and I do a lot of work on it. It has 3GB RAM with a core 2 duo processor and mac os 10.6.3. The problem is that it is becoming continuously slower. Sometimes scrolling in web sites is impressively slow (with the colour wheel spinning). Flash performance is horrible as well.

Any idea what I can do to make it faster without having to reformat it?

thanks a lot for your ideas.

 

[celticpride678]

Repair Disk Permissions, Run Onyx (free application), Restart, Apply all updates

 

[steveca]

it certainly helped a lot, thanks however flash performance is still incredibly low and scrolling in large files is really really slow... any ideas?

 

[celticpride678]

it certainly helped a lot, thanks however flash performance is still incredibly low and scrolling in large files is really really slow... any ideas?

Download Flash "Gala" if your computer supports it or the latest 10.1 release.

What do you mean by "large files" (what application)?

 

[emptyCup]

Is it just browsing that has become slow or everything? If everything how much free HD space do you have? Less than 10GB will really slow things down. While your at it, use Activity Monitor or iStat to check Page Ins/Page Outs. If Page Outs are greater than 5-10% of Page Ins more RAM will help.

 

[steveca]

downloaded the latest flash player but no improvement. will check on gala soon

Download Flash "Gala" if your computer supports it or the latest 10.1 release.

What do you mean by "large files" (what application)?

 

[steveca]

Is it just browsing that has become slow or everything? If everything how much free HD space do you have? Less than 10GB will really slow things down. While your at it, use Activity Monitor or iStat to check Page Ins/Page Outs. If Page Outs are greater than 5-10% of Page Ins more RAM will help.

It is pretty much everything... if i open a 20Mb pdf file and try scrolling through, it becomes a nightmare. Even a Word slows down and a pages file. Websites with flash content scroll down slowly while those with less content scroll smoothly

I have over 17Gb of free hard disk space and it looks like there is 1.5GB of free ram. read ins are larger than writes out and unfortunately I cant add more RAM because the system is not able to handle it.

What is strange is that everything was faster a couple of weeks ago, then suddenly it all became slower. I did not install any app or anything strange, just usual web work that i do. running onyx did help the OS part. Now when changing from one app to another it doesnt take too much time. Before when I was going to write something, even a search on google, the system will trail behind me. I would have written the search term and the characters will slowly start to appear...