Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Macbook Running Slow

A

andrewmonkey

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 19, 2011
4
0
hey I have a macbook with leopard on it. I use it in my church for editing videos and designing images.

I used to be a pc user so I bought an external hard drive an moved alot of my files over. I filled up the 200gb HD and after moving things I now have only 66gb of space.

My question is where are the rest of the files that are eating up my HD and what can I do to speed up the macbook?

I have 1.03 gb of system memory free.
 
Ok, what happens when I see what is taking up space? When I changed to all processes my free memory went down to 900 something mb.

How can i shut down processes and how do i do that?
 
andrewmonkey said:
When I changed to all processes my free memory went down to 900 something mb.
Click to expand...
Free memory isn't the whole picture. You don't have to do anything about how your memory is used. Mac OS X manages memory quite well, with no need for user intervention.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
andrewmonkey said:
How can i shut down processes and how do i do that?
Click to expand...
First, you shouldn't shut down any process unless you know what it is and how vital it is. You can select a process and use Quit on the menu, if needed. More importantly than quitting processes is to look at which ones, if any, are putting excessive demands on your CPU. If none are, leave them alone.

Look at what apps and widgets you have running. Quit any that you don't need. Look at System Preferences > Accounts > your account > Login Items and remove any you don't need to launch on startup.
 
Ok, any more tips and/or tricks. I have thought about defrag-ing the HD.

Also sorry about the repeat sentence.
 
Friend, once you get your hard drive full, your system slows down. Thats a mechanical caracteristic of HDDs. Even after erasing and having lots of GB available again, your mac will no longer have the same speed as before, because the hard drive works in a slower speed. Its a hardware condition, period.

Having said that, all you need to do is uprade your hard drive. Get a SSD and you will regreat not doing it before. Since you gonna open up your mac, get also a RAM upadte, as its insanelly cheap nowadays.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back