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Omygawd

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 22, 2008
2
0
Tampa Bay Area
Ok, first and foremost, I love my Mac. The problem is, I didn't shop for it myself, so my family bought it for my birhday and it has more bells and whistles than I would have chosen. So sometimes I get a little befuddled. I tried One on One with Apple store and that was not a good experience. The first thing the guy says is "wow, I didn't know it would do that", I knew I was in trouble. Just wanted to give you some background. I'm not dense but I need some guidance here. A lot of the terms are new to me so if you "dumb it down" I would be grateful.
My Mac has been chugging along smoothly but in the last week it has started to be rather slow. I get the "color wheel" a lot and when typing email the words do not catch up to the typing for several seconds., What can I check/do to correct or see what problem I'm having. I've re-booted,I've emptied large unnecessary files. I've been using bit torrent a lot to download some video. Should I be wary of those sites. Thanks for listening.:eek:
 
Right, what exactly did you show an experienced Mac user TRAINED to show you how OSX works?

Pirating movies is your problem. I suspect the bit torrent client is taking up your CPU cycles.
 
Open Activity Monitor (under Applications/Utilities) when you experience slow downs. See what's taking up CPU/RAM.
 
I'll jump in here to help things along.

You want the program to sort the different running processes to tell you which processes are stressing the CPU. In Activity Monitor, use the the CPU column heading to sort by descending order. The process that then moves to the top of the list (has the highest value in this column) is the process stressing the processor the most.

The second column from the left will tell you the name of the process itself. It's usually some variant of the application name. This will give you a good idea of what process(es) is/are eating into your CPU cycles.

If you go through the same steps using the real memory column, this will tell you which process(es) is/are using the most RAM.
 
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