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Robg54

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 27, 2008
46
0
My MBP has been feeling a little sluggish. It is relatively new, maybe 8-10 months old. I stll have Tiger, but will be upgrading to Leopard soon.

It feels like it has been slower than normal to open up programs lately. I have also been having some problems with my web browsers. (Firefox will sometimes just stop loading webpages graphics and will just show text.) I'm not sure if these are connected at all.

If I was still using a PC this is where I would erease any junk programs and like defrag the hard drive and stuff. Being as how I am a relative mac newbie I don't know what, if any, action I can take to keep it running like new. I checked the programs in the "Utilities" folder in applications, but didn't see anything that really seemed helpful.

Like I said, I am going to be installing Leopard (and I will be boot camping vista soon afterwards) and would much prefer to begin with a system that i running ship shape.
 
My MBP has been feeling a little sluggish. It is relatively new, maybe 8-10 months old. I stll have Tiger, but will be upgrading to Leopard soon.

It feels like it has been slower than normal to open up programs lately. I have also been having some problems with my web browsers. (Firefox will sometimes just stop loading webpages graphics and will just show text.) I'm not sure if these are connected at all.

If I was still using a PC this is where I would erease any junk programs and like defrag the hard drive and stuff. Being as how I am a relative mac newbie I don't know what, if any, action I can take to keep it running like new. I checked the programs in the "Utilities" folder in applications, but didn't see anything that really seemed helpful.

Like I said, I am going to be installing Leopard (and I will be boot camping vista soon afterwards) and would much prefer to begin with a system that i running ship shape.

get the program called "onyx" it works pretty well for me with cleaning/scripts and general maintenance.
 
still dosenet hurt to reinstall every so often, if you're upgrading to leopard do a full install, how much ram do you have?
 
I upgraded to 4gb:) It shoudn't be slow. Maybe I will do a fresh install. I'm just worried about getting everything I have over again. I guess it neednt be a worry...

I'll deff try Onyx. Thanks for the advice.
 
just get leopard, its a pretty decent OS now that we're on .2, and .3 should be right around the corner
 
I upgraded to 4gb:) It shoudn't be slow. Maybe I will do a fresh install. I'm just worried about getting everything I have over again. I guess it neednt be a worry...

I'll deff try Onyx. Thanks for the advice.

no prob, let us know how it works.
 
You can also defrag your HDD. It helps a bit.

Others: Don't give me crap about HFS not needing defrag; it does.
 
... you could also ' repair permissions ' by using the install disc that came with your Mac , it's quite a good idea to do that after installing any software


hope this helps
 
how do you defrag?
iDefrag
Drive Genius

Unfortunately neither one is free but I have personally used iDefrag and it works great (it's also cheaper). You can't defrag your startup disk so you have to either burn it to a cd, create a partition, or put your mac in Firewire Target Disk mode and use another mac to defrag it.

When using OnyX, click the "Automation" tab at the top of the window and then click the "Execute" button at the bottom. It's pretty harmless maintenance but could help speed things up.
 
Hrmmm...

Well, Onyx tells me my "Volume needs to be repaired." I don't have the cds that came with the computer. I have the Leopard CD, but I will be installing Leopard tomorrow if all goes well, unless I should repair the volume before installing Leopard or will Leopard fix it all up?

I may try with the disk defragmenter.

One last queston. I have been handbraking an excessive amount of movies to the point where the drive has been very close to full a couple times before I transfered the movies off. I am by no means an expert in hard drives, but would it be good for the drive to have the unused areas zeroed out? Or is this only if I was worried about sensitive data?
 
If you don't leave your computer on all night, there are some cleaning procedures Mac OS X goes through when it assumes you are not using your computer. You can manually run these from the terminal. Whenever I do, my computer seems to speed up a bit. After you open terminal, enter the following code (w/o quotes): "sudo periodic daily weekly monthly" then press return. After you enter an admin password, your computer will run through the cleaning routines. When it is finished, the terminal prompt will reappear, and then you can quit terminal. Works like a charm for me all the time :D. However, If you are running Leopard, I believe this still works, but there is no need to run it as Leopard runs it during the day in the background. Even though I am running Leopard, I still do it once in a while just for kicks.
 
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