New MBP slowing down???

[anh123]

Hi all,

In July of this year, I purchased a MBP for college. I fell in love with it right away. However, it seems as if it's been slowing down more and more everyday for the last month. I have been getting the spinning beach balls more frequently and for tasks that never needed them in the past. I have Onyx and keep everything clean and updated. Even as I'm typing this the computer is having a hard time keeping up. Right now, I have Firefox, Pages, and Activity Monitor (just watching to see if anything comes up: no unexpected programs or anything out of the ordinary at startup).

My specs: 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM early 2008 model 15" MBP, 200GB HD (110 GB available).

Any help? Thanks!

 

[anh123]

btw...

I ran the hardware test at startup and have repaired disk permissions. The slowness just seems to come and go. Not on a single session, but one session will be average speed and then the next time I power it up to use it it's slow. Eek.

 

[azharc]

I have no idea as to your issue, but maybe it's psychological - like after I got used to a 42" Plasma - CRT boxes looked so small. Maybe you've gotten used to your new found fast MBP (if you come from a slower PC for eg.) and notice the times a bit more.

Hey, just a thought

 

[johnkountz]

Try a fresh OSX install

You may have something slowing down the system, some bit of software.

Backup your system (SuperDuper)
Clean install OSX, erasing the current disk and all contents

DO NOT install anything, other than maybe Firefox. Use the computer at least 24 hours. If everything is OK, install an application, give it a day to see of anything has changed. Keep doing this until you notice a change.

This should identify a problem if it's software related.

good luck

 

[Logos327]

You may have something slowing down the system, some bit of software.

Backup your system (SuperDuper)
Clean install OSX, erasing the current disk and all contents

DO NOT install anything, other than maybe Firefox. Use the computer at least 24 hours. If everything is OK, install an application, give it a day to see of anything has changed. Keep doing this until you notice a change.

This should identify a problem if it's software related.

good luck

While this is certainly the most comprehensible solution, is there a better way? That could easily take weeks if you are doing it an application at a time. I suppose you could do three at a time or so, but that still seems like a lot of work.

 

[azharc]

Check what starts up at login (Accounts) and have a look at activity monitor to see if anything is taking up excessive memory/CPU?

Get something like iDefrag to see if that could be the problem.

 

[anh123]

some stats

Thanks everyone for your help thus far. In response to the previous post, I have been keeping activity monitor up for the past few days to see what's been going on. Of my 4GB of RAM, my "in-use" is about 1.1GB, running Firefox, Mail, and Activity Monitor. My CPU is at about 80% idle as I am typing this right now. This boot up seems to be working well, but as I stated earlier, every so often a boot up will take forever and a day and continue to lag throughout use.

Thanks again.

 

[alphaod]

When you boot, hold Command-V to boot into Verbose mode and see what's slowing the computer down.

 

[jeffy.dee-lux]

Maybe try making a new user profile and see if it's still slow when logged in there.