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MBP slowing to a crawl....

C

chainprayer

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 10, 2008
638
2
My wife has a MBP G4. It is steadily decreasing in speed which is very frustrating since she uses it for her online master's program. Are there any tricks for getting the speed higher? I have tried Maintenance and completely erasing/reinstalling then restoring her TM backup.

She has plenty of HD space free and doesn't install any junk applications. It has slowly gotten to the point where it takes 45 seconds to open iTunes.

Help!
 
Check Activity Monitor (All Processes) and see if anything's running in the background.

Which machine is it (for reference)? There aren't any G4 MBPs. Also, how much RAM.
 
Sorry... PowerBook G4. I'm tired :p

She has 1 GB of RAM. I also attached a screenshot of her current processes. I don't see anything thats eating up much processor time.

EDIT: I also just checked all processes, nothing over 5%
 

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chainprayer said:
Sorry... PowerBook G4. I'm tired :p

She has 1 GB of RAM. I also attached a screenshot of her current processes. I don't see anything thats eating up much processor time.
Click to expand...

Looking at the graph, something hit 100%. Select "All Processes", instead of "My Processes" and see what crops up.
 
also take into account that iTunes has had some significant updates in the last 6 months. As processors get faster the OS / Apps get inherently larger with more features. Just the name of the game
 
That spike occurred when I was flipping through windows trying to get the activity monitor up.

Is it normal to have so many processes running at once? I'm not sure what most of them are... I'm afraid to end something that is important to the OS.
 

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...and i just now noticed having a single safari page open with a flash banner pushes the processor up to 100% constant usage
 
try ending safari and use Firefox ... maybe you have a memory leak or something ... also did you try running Onyx and perform the repair permissions thingy?
 
Yes. Normal number. Most you don't need to know about (that's why there's "My Processes")

Try clearing the cache in Safari. I don't think Safari itself has any inherent problem.

What's the "System Memory" look like? I just had a thought: If you have 2 512MB SODIMMs, and one failed, it could end up thrashing the hard drive swapping pages - major slowdown. I've seen it happen, first hand.

a side note: I noticed you ran "Grab", I assume for the screen shot.

You can do screen shots at anytime, without running it by using the following shortcuts:

cmd-shift-3 whole screen capture
cmd-shift-4 gives you a cursor, just select what you want to capture
cmd-shift-4, followed by "space" gives you a "camera" icon. Hover over the window you wish to capture, then click. I use this most of the time, as it's much easier than outlining a window with the cursor.

Screen shots should show up on your Desktop with the name "Picture x"
 
FYI, the screencapture commands save the screenshot as a .PNG by default. If you want to change the format to JPG, you can do that using Onyx (there is a setting where you can select the output file format)
 
no one has mentioned the harddrive yet. if the harddrive is dieing with read/write errors. that will definatly show as a significant speed drop. even if u try and boot from a external.

get it checked out. take it to a apple shop
 
hmm. ive already checked the smart status and run everything disk utility has to offer. would this not show a possible hd failure?
 
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