Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Osx getting sluggish!

T

thriii

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 14, 2007
366
0
Ah.. i got a spinning wheel just typing in that title and switching to the body of the thread!

I'm looking to speed up my mac! Could someone give me some suggestions on what I can do to speed things up? Can you also tell me what your suggestion wil do so I know if I need to backup some stuff or anything first !

Thanks ;)
 
fsck (single user boot, or run disk repair from the DVD) -- keep running it until it is all repaired or fails to make any more repairs.

repair permissions (must be run off the hard drive, otherwise data files use might be outdated)

Edit: after the above -- adding a new user should point out if there is something wrong with the install or the user.
 
Sun Baked said:
fsck (single user boot, or run disk repair from the DVD) -- keep running it until it is all repaired or fails to make any more repairs.

repair permissions (must be run off the hard drive, otherwise data files use might be outdated)...
Click to expand...

Do what sun baked suggested, also you should check out Onyx, its a tool for doing some maintenance. Be sure to always read the description of what each command does and dont run it if you're not sure about it. Also, clean up garbage files that you might not need.

As the time passes, each of us adds stuff on his/her mac, or has apps to open on login. This will affect speed in general, its pretty normal. If all the above dont work for you, try buying some ram or reinstalling OSX
 
be extremely careful when doing anything from fsck or any utility program or else you might be back on here with "My preferences are gone"

Check you hard drive. The computer could be running slow because it is unable to write any of the RAM to the hard drive. You should have at least 10G open to ensure the computer will run efficiently.
 
thx 4 all the replies! I actually have 10.46gb free and I'm working on clearing that now.. after that I'll backup my files just incase then go on to tryin what sun baked suggested
 
thriii said:
thx 4 all the replies! I actually have 10.46gb free and I'm working on clearing that now.. after that I'll backup my files just incase then go on to tryin what sun baked suggested
Click to expand...

Yeah virtual memory gets unhappy when you have very little free space available and the space that is available is fragmented. You need to install a larger HDD or clear off a lot of the space.
 
10GB of free hard drive space should be more than ample for virtual memory swap files -- they rarely get to more than 2GB, unless you have something unusual going on. Also, free hard drive space is reported by the Finder, so the 10GBs you have free includes the space used for swap files.

The simplest test is to restart your Mac. This deletes your current virtual memory swap files. If it speeds up immediately afterwards, then you can probably use more RAM. If it doesn't, then you've got another problem.
 
now I have 25gb free :D and things are movin faster.. I ran fsck -f and that gave me no errors, reset the PRAM, repaired permissions, cleaned up desktop, and installed quicksilver so I wouldn't need much in my dock.

A while ago, I remember there was a way to reset the "Open Recent" part of all apps.. does this speed up anything?

Is there anything else I can do to speed/clean this up some more?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back