OS X slowing down...

[CANEHDN]

If all else fails you could try a fresh install of the OS. Every once in a while it's a good idea to install a fresh copy of an OS. OS X and Windows start to lag a bit after a while.

 

[IJ Reilly]

If all else fails you could try a fresh install of the OS. Every once in a while it's a good idea to install a fresh copy of an OS. OS X and Windows start to lag a bit after a while.

Ah, I wondered why it took so long for this bad advice to surface.

OSX is not Windows. Reinstalls of OSX are hardly ever necessary.

 

[irishgrizzly]

They intentionally slow OS X a bit with each incremental update. 10.4.9 should bring your Pro to its knees, hence insuring that you will be lining up outside the Apple Store nearest you the night before Leopard is released.

The good news is that Leopard will be blazingly fast...at least for awhile.

Funny, I'm running 10.4.8 on my old ibook and it runs as quick as the day I first booted it.

 

[bbarnhart]

Reinstalling Mac OS X is not needed. I have a 4 year old Mac that I've only upgraded the OS, never a fresh install. Try repairing permissions and running the Onyx tools. Also, leave you Mac on 24/7 for over a week so the background processes can run.

The Logitech mouse driver may be suspect. Trying removing it and see if it's any faster.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Reinstalling Mac OS X is not needed. I have a 4 year old Mac that I've only upgraded the OS, never a fresh install. Try repairing permissions and running the Onyx tools. Also, leave you Mac on 24/7 for over a week so the background processes can run.

The Logitech mouse driver may be suspect. Trying removing it and see if it's any faster.

Someone can please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe since 10.4 the Mac does not have to be on all night to run the maintenance scripts.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Someone can please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe since 10.4 the Mac does not have to be on all night to run the maintenance scripts.

I'd love to correct you, but.. I know there were bugs, it needed to be left on or it wouldn't run.. it could be suspended and it would run next night, and all this other crap.. and I have no idea where apple left off.

But then again my mini runs 10.3.9 so I never needed to keep on top of it either

 

[zamwi]

Me too.

I noticed my Macbook Pro slowing down a little too. Today was the breaking point for it. I opened up TextMate and it asked me for my serial (again). Then I realized all my purchased software was doing this.

So I used the disk utility to Repair Permissions, then I downloaded OnyX and cleared my cache and ran the maintanence scripts. Now it feels brand new.

 

[bbarnhart]

Someone can please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe since 10.4 the Mac does not have to be on all night to run the maintenance scripts.

Could be. I don't know. I leave my PM G4 on all the time (it doubles as a file server). I remembered something about the daily, weekly etc scripts. I would think by now (10.4.*) that you wouldn't need to leave it on all the time or run the cron jobs manually.

Did they user ever report back after running Onyx?

 

[bousozoku]

I noticed my Macbook Pro slowing down a little too. Today was the breaking point for it. I opened up TextMate and it asked me for my serial (again). Then I realized all my purchased software was doing this.

So I used the disk utility to Repair Permissions, then I downloaded OnyX and cleared my cache and ran the maintanence scripts. Now it feels brand new.

That's interesting since people have mentioned that the maintenance scripts should run automatically after sleep (or at boot time?), as well as during the middle of the night since 10.4.2, I believe.

 

[daveL]

Are you running Palm Desktop? I just discovered that all the Palm components are PPC only *and* it starts a background process when you log in! So, if you have installed Palm desktop, you are starting a background process running on Rosetta, and it continues to run periodically! Kill the beast!

 

[IJ Reilly]

That's interesting since people have mentioned that the maintenance scripts should run automatically after sleep (or at boot time?), as well as during the middle of the night since 10.4.2, I believe.

This has been discussed quite a bit here and elsewhere. With Tiger, Apple abandoned the old Unix "cron" routine for something called "launchd," which among other things is supposed to run the maintenance scripts at the appropriate time when the Mac is on, as opposed to the middle of the night or never. I'm sure I don't understand the technical issues, but since 10.4, I haven't run any of the maintenance applications, like I used to with 10.3 and earlier. YMMV, of course, but I've come to believe that it isn't necessary anymore.

 

[bousozoku]

This has been discussed quite a bit here and elsewhere. With Tiger, Apple abandoned the old Unix "cron" routine for something called "launchd," which among other things is supposed to run the maintenance scripts at the appropriate time when the Mac is on, as opposed to the middle of the night or never. I'm sure I don't understand the technical issues, but since 10.4, I haven't run any of the maintenance applications, like I used to with 10.3 and earlier. YMMV, of course, but I've come to believe that it isn't necessary anymore.

I haven't really noticed but since my machine is on 24 hours a day, it's not an issue for me. I guess I should take a quick look to see if crontab has been changed.

Of course, it might not account for people who mess with their systems because they know better. You know what I mean.

 

[CyberPrey]

Sorry to take so long getting back on this.. (mucho overtime... ick!)

Tons of good advice here, soon as I get home tonight I am going to get to work and will let you all know what I am able to dig up.

I appreciate a ton all of the very detailed explanations on how to do things. I'm very new to OS X, and the detailed explanations really help out a LOT