SLOW Macbok Pro driving me crazy!

[glossolalia]

I bought my MacBook Pro about 2 years ago, and it has served me well for most of those two years, but over the past few weeks it has considerably slowed down, to the point that I have to restart it every few hours just to keep it functional.

It's not the memory I don't think:

Is there a way I can sort of start with "a clean slate" without having to delete all my precious information? What is typically done in this scenario?

If anyone needs any more information, I'll be more than happy to get to the bottom of this.

Thanks,

Brandon

 

[stridemat]

Have you tried resetting the PRAM and SMC?

Are you able to post a screen shot of the System Memory tab in Activity monitor when your Mac slow down?

 

[sotiredofsoup]

I am currently running into this same problem on my Early 2008 MBP. I doubled the memory to 4gb, which hasn't had any impact on the slowness. Firefox takes about 20 bounces to load. I was about to swap the SuperDrive out for an SSD (boot drive) to make it nice and snappy again, but I accidentally bought the OWC Data Doubler which only works on unibody and I will end up selling because they charge restocking fees on top of me paying return shipping. I was planning on copying everything to an external drive and weed through it to get rid of unused files when i copy them back into a new Snow Leopard install.

If you just want to reinstall, I would think you could take a time machine backup of your MBP, reinstall OS X, then restore from the Time Machine backup.

Hard to say if this would improve performance as it would put all the files you have back where they were.

 

[Dalton63841]

IF you are okay with redoing your personalized settings, a trick I find works as good as a reinstall is this:

1. Enable Root account. (Google how)
2. Login to Root.
3. Open System Preferences and open Accounts.
4. Delete your user account, it will ask if you want to save the user folder. You DO want to save it.
5. Create a new account with the same name as your old one. (Doesn't have to be the same name, but some people are attached to their username)
6. Log out of Root and into the new user account you made.
7. Disable Root account.
8. Copy all your data from the old user folder into your new user folder.
9. Delete old user folder.

The reason this works is because almost everything you do on your computer is stored in your user folder. This gives you a fresh slate obviously.

The only down side is that you have to set up bookmarks/settings/login details again. (TBH your can get around that if you know what files save that info, but its kindof advanced.)

 

[matspekkie]

Fix disk permissions

First off i would try to do "fix disk permissions" to do this go to applications / utilities / disc utility then select your drive and select repair permissions. This will take a while and might fix a lot of issues. I that does not help try and add a new user account see is the slowness also happens there.

 

[mharpo]

First off i would try to do "fix disk permissions" ...

Also, you might get something like Drive Genius 3 to do the repair permissions, defrag, repair, etc... If you've not done these things before, your problems will likely be resolved when you do.

 

[glossolalia]

Have you tried resetting the PRAM and SMC?

Are you able to post a screen shot of the System Memory tab in Activity monitor when your Mac slow down?

Just reset PRAM and SMC.

Here's a screenshot of my Activity Monitor during a characteristically slow period:

It usually happens when I have open iChat+Firefox+Other application.

 

[wiraone]

It seems the SEO Spyglass is eating up your CPU time. Try exiting the application and see if this resolve your problem.

 

[stridemat]

SEO Spyglass is causing you your issues.

 

[glossolalia]

I still see slowness even when I don't have SEO Spyglass opened.

If I wipe my hard drive and do a clean reinstall of Mac OSX, would that bring my computer back to how it was when I first got it, in terms of speed?

 

[wiraone]

There are two other processes that eating up your CPU other than the Spyglass, the vcencoder & the iChat. It seems that iChat probably the cause too since vcencoder is fired up by iChat. Using google, it seems that iChat does indeed causes a hell lot of problem for others.

Reinstalling the OS might or might not solve the problem. If you've nothing much in your HD, then go ahead reinstalling the OS.