Speed up & de-clutter

[fooddestroyer]

My 2 year old MBP running OSX has got more sluggish. The little multicolored spinning timer wheel keeps appearing a lot more now, and I hate it!

When my old PC used to do this delayed reaction thing, I could go into the running applications and do a general de-clutter of things including the registry.

As I am only a mac novice, I write to ask if there is a way to (safely) de-clutter and check the overall health of this loaded MBP and have things fast and punchy again like when I bought it?

Oh, and something else on this theme of speed: If there is no/little improvement through the answers I get to my first question, when I install Snow Leopard do you think it will speed things and take me back to lighting speed?

Thanks for any help offered.

 

[LoganT]

The multi-colored spinning timer is more frequently referred to as "The beach ball of death". There's things you can do, such as Onyx. You may want to just format the HD and install Snow Leopard fresh.

 

[Crouchback]

Speed Up a Sluggish Mac

Slow Mac issues are generally caused by one of three things: RAM over-utilization, too little free space on your hard drive or various, esoteric issues with system permissions and the like.

Assuming you have already done the basics (emptied your Trash and restarted), I would do the following to solve most common problems.

--Check your boot drive to make sure you have at least 10% of it empty (for instance, you need at least 50GB of free space on a 500GB hard drive). If you don't, you need to clear up some space. Good (free) apps that can help with this are GrandPerspective and WhatSize, but there are lots of others.

--Open up Activity Monitor (Applications>Utilities>Activity Monitor) and look at the system memory tab, specifically at page ins and page outs. If page outs are 10% or greater of page ins, you can use more memory for what you run. A page out occurs when there isn't enough memory to run all that's being requested, so OS X writes some memory to the hard drive to make room for something else. Too much and performance suffers. There are a lot of good blog posts around detailing how to minimize RAM usage on startup that you might want to take a look at.

--Download and run Onyx to fix system permissions and free up some additional space on your hard drive.

Good luck.
__________________
Crouchback
http://www.tireddonkey.com

 

[superflush]

Good (free) apps that can help with this are GrandPerspective and WhatSize, but there are lots of others.

What would you recommend between GrandPerspective and WhatSize?
i've been using Disk Inventory X, but it is kind of a heavy app.
WhatSize can be picked up for $6 at http://www.themacbundles.com/ and GrandPerspective is free. I think I'll switch to one of these.