Macbook pro late 2008 slower after ram upgrade

W

wavymedia

macrumors newbie
Hello, so I'm upgrading some parts on my late 2008 macbook pro. I have bought new ram (2x4gb to replace 2x2gb), I am adding a ssd drive and I have bought a new battery.

The ram and the battery arrived first, so I added the new ram, removed the broken optical drive and put in the new battery.

But now the computer is performing slower than it was before, straight after I added the new ram.

I have only really been using web browsers so far... But facebook almost grinds it to a halt, youtube videos slow down the performance of the entire machine, and I keep getting 'unresponsive script' messages on almost every page I visit (in different browsers). I notice other general slowdowns aswell such as applications taking a long time to close.

EDIT: yeah, its not just web browsing, the entire machine has taken a sudden dip in performance and is almost unusable for most applications. I'm having to use my ipad for all my web needs right now

Something definitely has changed overnight, but could a ram upgrade have caused this? My mac clearly recognises the new 8gb.

Any help appreciated. Thanks
 
You said that you were adding an SSD.
Have you swapped out the hard drive for an SSD?
If not, your symptoms sound just like a failing hard drive.

You CAN look in your Activity Monitor to check if something is using a lot of CPU time, or your memory is busy, giving you lots of page outs. I would expect at least the memory usage to be better going from 4GB to 8GB, but it's worth checking out in your Activity Monitor. Make sure that the windows in AM are set to show All Processes, and not just My Processes.

What version of OS X are you running?
How much free space do you have on your hard drive? That will be the space listed as "Available" in the Get Info window for your hard drive.
 
This was what I thought too, and this toshiba hard drive has been in the machine 4 or 5 years now.

It just appeared really strange that it took a sudden turn for the worse after the ram upgrade (not a gradual transition, the last time I turned the machine on before the upgrade there were no problems).

I'm going to get the ssd in there next week. I ordered the wrong caddy this week.

I'll check out the activity monitor now
 
wavymedia said:
This was what I thought too, and this toshiba hard drive has been in the machine 4 or 5 years now.

It just appeared really strange that it took a sudden turn for the worse after the ram upgrade (not a gradual transition, the last time I turned the machine on before the upgrade there were no problems).

I'm going to get the ssd in there next week. I ordered the wrong caddy this week.

I'll check out the activity monitor now
Click to expand...
Hard drives sometimes go into failure fairly quickly. May just be a coincidence.
Caddy? for an SSD? In the event that your hard drive is failing, you can just replace that drive with your new SSD!
If you really do want to swap out your optical drive, you can also use the hard drive from that position.
 
Check on the battery. If the MBP sees something wrong with the battery, it can run at 1/2 CPU power, and be slow as ish.
 
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