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The Pinwheel

H

Hrothgar

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 11, 2009
530
23
New York
I know every PC owner thinks his or her machine slows down over time. I think my 2-year old 17" MBP is slowing. I'm getting the pinwheel more and more. Often, I'm just surfing the net, maybe with iTunes idle in the background. Sometimes streaming iTunes through my Aexpress. On a few occasions I'll add Word for Mac.

More and more times, both surfing and switching around programs, I get the pinwheel. Also, when I go into find and start scrolling, say, through the applications list, it takes a good 20 seconds or so to "load" completely and stop moving "jerky".

I do have VM Fusion loaded on my machine. When that is running, everything slows down considerably (although I gather it's not supposed to).

Is there a diagnostic I can run or something?
 
How much RAM do you have, which MBP model, is your hard drive full, what is your CPU activity (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor > select All Processes and sort by CPU)?

You could use ONYX to clean up some stuff.

What OS are you using? (10.4, 10.5)
 
You could use ONYX. In the mean time you can try some of the basics:

1. Delete "Caches" folder from ~/Library/
2. Empty Caches in Safari.app and reset it.

Usually deleting the "Caches" folder from the users Library folder does wonders especially if you have never removed or delete it. 2 years of junk just sitting there can slow your system down. You should see an immediate change.
 
ViciousShadow21 said:
how safe is it to do this? is everything in there useless for system function?
Click to expand...

It's safe to clear caches as they're meant to be temporary stores of information, such as Web browser caches.

Definition:
• (also cache memory) Computing an auxiliary memory from which high-speed retrieval is possible.

It is a good idea to run maintenance scripts, unless your Mac is on overnight regularly. They're programmed to run in the middle of the night... :confused:

Repairing permissions is that peculiar Mac thing, but it helps. :)
 
spinnerlys said:
How much RAM do you have, which MBP model, is your hard drive full, what is your CPU activity (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor > select All Processes and sort by CPU)?

You could use ONYX to clean up some stuff.

What OS are you using? (10.4, 10.5)
Click to expand...

I've got:
Mac OS X 10.5.6
Processor: 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Do
Memory 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Hard drive: Capacity: 148.73; Available 50.63
CPU Usage: 99-95% idle


What are maintenance scripts?

Thanks.
 
I recently formatted and put osx back on, installed on the few programs i really use and my machine has been really snappy.

If your up for it, do it.
 
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