....My Mac seems slow

[blaklaybul]

I have had my mac for about 5 months now. It does not go at blazing speeds the way it used to. I'm running OS X 10.5 I have about 45 GB left on my hard drive. For instance, when running photoshop, everything seems slower than before. PDF's load very slowly on Safari. Office 2008 lags.

What could it be?

Any advice?

 

[72930]

You may need more RAM, how much do you have? Did you do an upgrade install of Leopard? If so, try backing up and doing an Erase & Install 🙂

 

[blaklaybul]

I have 2.4 MBP 2Gb Ram

I archived and installed

 

[Consultant]

OFFICE 2008 definitely takes up resources.
I noticed slow down after installing it.

 

[theman]

MS office shouldn't affect anything when it's not running, unless of course you are extremely low on disk space.

 

[Amdahl]

From the Finder menu, go to the Go menu, and select Utilities. (Or Applications, then open Utilities.) Find Activity Monitor and start it. A window with lots of stuff should appear. If not, click the Activity Monitor icon that will have appeared in the Dock. Make sure that the Filter at the top is set to All Processes.

Now, click the column header for CPU until the largest users are at the top. See if anything exceptionally high shows up. Then do the same thing for the Real Memory or RSS column. Anything that is using over 500MB might be a concern. Don't worry about anything in Virtual Memory.

At the bottom, change to System Memory tab, and see if you have any Free memory. Early after a reboot, you should have plenty of Free memory. At least 200MB free.