Slow MacBook Pro

[ermusician]

Hello,

Recently my macbook pro has been running sluggish. Sometimes (like now), speed is fine and is running like the day I got it. Other times (most of the time), everything takes forever to load. Especially when I'm on Safari. I see the beach ball of death. I recently cleaned it out, deleting applications I don't use. I also repaired disks and all that stuff. I've been looking this up over the past week and have come across the Activity Monitor. Below I took a screen shot of mine. Could someone tell me if all looks good? I saw somewhere that I may need more RAM. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[GGJstudios]

If you're having performance issues, this may help:

Performance Tips For Mac OS X​

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

 

[ermusician]

If you're having performance issues, this may help:

Performance Tips For Mac OS X​

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

I did just about everything that page told me to do and just restarted it. Activity Monitor is now showing 0 page outs and 143.22 page ins. Is this good?

 

[GGJstudios]

I did just about everything that page told me to do and just restarted it. Activity Monitor is now showing 0 page outs and 143.22 page ins. Is this good?

The purpose of restarting is to reset your page outs to zero. Now track your page outs under your normal workload. Page ins are irrelevant, as you will always have those.

 

[Dark Void]

More RAM would help, as would a SSD.

 

[ermusician]

The purpose of restarting is to reset your page outs to zero. Now track your page outs under your normal workload. Page ins are irrelevant, as you will always have those.

Still running at 0; I'm going to see if that changes throughout the night as I do my normal work. Thank you.

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More RAM would help, as would a SSD.

I'm looking into the SSD right now. I figured I'd need to upgrade at some point seeing my model is a late 2008. Any recommendations?

 

[faroZ06]

The problem may be that your Mac Pro is actually a MacBook Pro and is therefor slower. I'd ask for a refund.

 

[Dark Void]

I'm looking into the SSD right now. I figured I'd need to upgrade at some point seeing my model is a late 2008. Any recommendations?

Lots of reputable brands. I am looking into SSDs myself currently and I think I am going to go for either the Crucial M4 or Samsung 830. Intel and OCZ, amongst others, make nice SSDs as well.

 

[snaky69]

Dying hard drive? From your activity monitor screenshot, you definitely aren't running out of RAM...

 

[ermusician]

Dying hard drive? From your activity monitor screenshot, you definitely aren't running out of RAM...

That was basically my original question. So I guess now I'm leaning more towards an SSD. Thank you

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Lots of reputable brands. I am looking into SSDs myself currently and I think I am going to go for either the Crucial M4 or Samsung 830. Intel and OCZ, amongst others, make nice SSDs as well.

Thanks so much for your help. Now it's running slow again haha. In a couple hours it'll be normal again.

 

[Idefix]

2 GB RAM is inadequate. Upgrade your RAM.

 

[DVD9]

2 GB RAM is inadequate. Upgrade your RAM.

Clearly that is not true for him.

99% of laptop users will never need more than 4GB and for this guy two gigs is plenty.

An SSD drive is definitely what he should purchase.

 

[Inside_line]

In order:

Stop using Safari, they are not updating it for your OS anymore. I'd suggest Firefox.

If you can, upgrade to snow leopard.

Upgrade RAM, it's cheap and 2GB is behind the times.

If it's still too slow for you, SSD.

 

[ermusician]

In order:

Stop using Safari, they are not updating it for your OS anymore. I'd suggest Firefox.

If you can, upgrade to snow leopard.

Upgrade RAM, it's cheap and 2GB is behind the times.

If it's still too slow for you, SSD.

Ordered more RAM today. It's cheap anyway. If it's still slow I'll go ahead and look at an SSD card. Pricing isn't bad on those. I'll pay whatever I have to in order for it to work correctly. Thanks