Running Slow

Very oddly, my MBP has been running very slow and sluggish lately. The clock is traveling much slower than real time (I turned my computer on at 9:20 PM, the computer clock now reads 9:24 PM and my cell phone indicates that it is actually 9:41 PM). Applications are slow to open and close. Even when I click the battery icon, the drop down menu is slow to disappear and fade away after clicking away. Audio is extremely choppy, and so is video. It's as if the computer is running at a very slow frame rate.

The thing is, I can't seem to figure out what is causing this. There is a lot of unused memory, as there should be. Most of the time Mail and Firefox are the only applications open.

I've done some googling and found that a few others are having this problem after the latest security update. Makes sense in my case, as this all started after I installed the latest update. The one thing I have not been able to find is a solution. Some of the posts I found go back to March 20thish, so I was hoping someone had figured it out by now.

Oh, and for some odd reason repairing permissions in Disk Utility makes the computer fine and back to normal while it's repairing.. but immediately after it's done it goes back to being sluggish.

The computer is fairly new, purchased last July.

17" MBP, 2GB RAM, running Leopard.

Thanks in advance.

 

Thanks for the response rolex

http://img181.imageshack.us/img181/4480/picture3zy8.png

The baffling thing is, nothing is using much of the CPU. Same goes for disk activity as well.