MacBook suddenly extremely slow

[bristleworm]

Hi.

My girlfriends MacBook (MacBook 4,1, Intel Core 2 Duo, 2,1 GHz, 2GB RAM, 800MHz Bus, OS X 10.7.2) has recently slowed down extremely. It was running just fine a few weeks ago, but now it can take up to five minutes to open a blank document in pages, and safari is showing the spinning beachball every few minutes.
I already reinstalled and restored from time machine, but it didn't help. I'm not sure, but it could be that the problems first occurred after installing 10.7.2. Any ideas on that? Or any other ideas? Oh, and I also scanned the HDD using TechTool, but it seems to be fine.

 

[logana]

Hard disk would have been my guess but you have checked that.....

Try booting from a OSX dvd and verify and repair permissions.

If you are running Lion you really need more than 2GB - the symptoms you have described are similar to running Lion with 1GB ram - does it still show 2 x 1GB chips in system profiler ?

You could try taking a module out and check how it runs with just 1GB and then try with each module one at a time.

I suspect ram problem....

 

[Nameci]

Fire up activity monitor and see what are the applications that eat up you cpu cycles. I recommend at least 4 gb of ram if you are on HDD and 2 gb of ram if you are using SSD for Lion to work flawless.

 

[logana]

Fire up activity monitor and see what are the applications that eat up you cpu cycles. I recommend at least 4 gb of ram if you are on HDD and 2 gb of ram if you are using SSD for Lion to work flawless.

Agreed - but remember to select all processes for the cpu - it could be a print job that is eating CPU

 

[ezramoore]

Unless you already have a backup or you do not care about the data contained on the hard drive I wouldn't do either of the previously suggest things.

If you're savvy I would backup the hard drive immediately.

If you're not, I would take it to someone who is.

I would then have the hard drive tested.

Then you can do things like run permission verification (and otherwise stress the drive).

 

[minifridge1138]

Unless you already have a backup or you do not care about the data contained on the hard drive I wouldn't do either of the previously suggest things.

If you're savvy I would backup the hard drive immediately.

If you're not, I would take it to someone who is.

I would then have the hard drive tested.

Then you can do things like run permission verification (and otherwise stress the drive).

That's actually a very good point.
I'd buy an external USB drive and either setup Time Machine or clone the hard drive before you do much else.
That way if the problem is a dying hard drive, you won't loose any data.

If you already have all of your data backed up, then just go ahead with the suggestions.


Some other things to look at:
1) how much free space is on the hard drive?
2) what programs start when you login?
3) in activity monitor, look at memory. How many page outs do you have?