Performance degredation on MacBook

[darxide23]

I have a late-2008 aluminum unibody MacBook with OS X 10.7.4 and in the last couple months it's started getting really slow especially when loading up Chrome or Firefox. I've kept it up to date with software updates for the OS and all the applications I use.

I don't know much about Mac OS X and certainly don't know anything about determining the cause of a performance loss. I'm a PC guy and have troubleshot and repaired PCs with all flavors of Windows and a few of Linux for the last 10+ years, but I'm stumped when it comes to Mac. I've had no reason to dig too deep into the innards of the OS yet.

I'm just asking for some help on which way to go from here to figure this problem out.

Thanks.

 

[xSPRINTERx]

How much RAM do you have ?

You can try to repair the permissions. This is done in disk utility in settings.

My MacBook is the late 2008 I have upgraded the RAM and put a SSD into the SuperDrive bay and it's now super fast.

When I put 10.7 on (before these updates) it was as slow as hell.

 

[GGJstudios]

I have a late-2008 aluminum unibody MacBook with OS X 10.7.4 and in the last couple months it's started getting really slow especially when loading up Chrome or Firefox. I've kept it up to date with software updates for the OS and all the applications I use.

Performance Tips For Mac OS X

For Flash-related issues:

• Find your Flash version and make sure it's the latest version available. Never install or update Flash from a pop-up on a website. Always go to Adobe's site to get Flash or updates.
• Install ClickToFlash (Safari), Flashblock (Firefox) or FlashBlock (Chrome) to control which Flash content plays on websites.
• Try using the YouTube HTML5 Video Player to watch YouTube videos, when available. (May impact fullscreen viewing. See link for details.) As far as performance impact, YMMV.

 

[unixperience]

as a computer guy im sure you know that it is most likely harddrive related. If your harddrive is more than 50% full it performs significantly slower (this is due to the hash table algorithm that most drives use to quickly store and access information). The harddrive could also be old and failing (like mine is haha).

if you dont turn your computer off often, just restart it, that can sometimes help. are there any specific times or tasks that make it go "slower" or is it jsut all around slow?