MBP (Early '08) Sluggish with 4GB RAM

[pexel]

I've got an early 2008 MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD with ~30GB currently free. When I boot up, it takes a while for things to load and loading Safari (v4 Public Beta) is excruciatingly slow the first time, as is iTunes, iPhoto etc...

Come a few hours of using the machine and things seem to slow down to a halt, I experience the beach ball very frequently when surfing the web.

I've just quit all open apps except Safari and checked Activity Monitor:

Free: 283MB
Wired: 580
Active: 1.94GB
Inactive: 1.20GB
Used: 3.71
VM Size: 46.15
Swap Used: 1.65

Why would OS X be using swap if I'e got free and inactive RAM? Basically the machine is feeling very sluggish and I have no idea what to do...

 

[ViciousShadow21]

someone had a similar problem. try resetting the PRAM.

 

[daneoni]

ANd make sure your drive has no errors

 

[Sun Baked]

Also checking out how to reset the SMC may be worth a shot.

 

[88888888]

Hmm Thanks!.