MacBook performance slower?

[doubleohseven]

I have a base-model MacBook (the latest one with the Santa Rosa chipset), and over the past couple of weeks, I found that the overall performance is quite slower.

For example, in the first month of owning my MacBook, the boot up time was 35 seconds. Now, it is 54 seconds! Also, when I clicked on Safari, the beachball came up just to load up my start page (which is macrumors). On that topic, I'm finding that the beachball is coming up a lot more often than it did before.

What's happening to my MacBook? Why is it performing slower than it did before? It shouldn't be because of a virus, because Macs are virus-free, right?

I just upgraded it to 10.5.2 and upgraded the Leopard graphics, and it didn't help the performance at all- it is still slow.

Is anyone else's MacBooks performing slower? What can I do to make it faster? Thanks for your help .

 

[Sun Baked]

How much space is left on the drive?

Though check the logs to see if something is now problematic, that could be where your problem shows itself is it doesn't on the activity monitor.

 

[doubleohseven]

How much space is left on the drive?

46.26GB is left on the hard drive.

 

[LeeTom]

first thing to try is open Disk Utility (in Applications -> Utilities)
In Disk Utility, click on your Hard Drive in the upper-left, then click the Repair Permissions button at the bottom.

second thing to do is open Terminal (in Applications -> Utilities) and type in:
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

it'll ask for your password, then it'll take about 5 minutes before giving you a prompt again.

these are both little maintenance things that can help speed things up..

Lee Tom

 

[Sun Baked]

Heck Repair Drive might be in order also.

 

[doubleohseven]

I repaired the drive, and it came up with this information (click for a larger view):

Also, I did the command in Terminal, but when it asked for my password, I couldn't type it in- I could only press the return key, but then it said "sorry, try again".

 

[pjrobertson]

That's one of the strange / different things about UNIX / Mac and the terminal. When it asks for your password and you type it in, nothing appears on the screen. No stars or anything.

Just type in your password normally when it asks and press enter. Trust me, it will be entered just you won't know it!

 

[xraydoc]

A couple other suggestions...

•Clear the Safari cache. Lots of favicons and other junk that collects can slow things down in Safari. There's a hack floating around to disable Safari's caching of favicons which really seems to speed things up (though I haven't applied it myself).

•Check your log in items. Your machine will take longer to finish booting if you've added items to your log in list (i.e., Microsoft or Logitech mouse background apps, menu bar iTunes controllers, etc.). Third-party preference panes (MenuMeters, etc) also take extra time to load which will add up if you have a lot of them.

•Check your fonts. Unnecessary or duplicate fonts can potentially slow things down (at least in my experience) in terms of launching certain apps and booting.

 

[ayeying]

mm.. if you can, do a complete time machine back up, then put in your restore disk and restore your entire drive to the time machine back up. From this, you actually defrag the entire hard drive and your performance goes up. I do this every month or so, its somewhat of a hassle to restore 200GB worth of files, but the performance boost is astonishing. Plus, you don't reinstall anything, you just go back to whenever you made your back up.

 

[Sun Baked]

I will say again, if there is a drive file sytem/catalog error -- it will slow the drive down.

If the machine suddenly slows, running repair drive or fsck might find something.

A corrupt file system generally leads to a flashing ? mark if you let it go.