Why did my 13" MBP get slower?

[Herb Dorklift]

I've owned it for a couple months. I've downloaded stuff, installed stuff, but mainly whacked stuff onto an external HD to keep my lappy's free.

Out of the 250gb I've somehow used 100gb and I can't think on what. I have a couple of films on there, Sims 3, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft office etc, but that's not 100gb surely? How much space does the stuff that's already there take up?

It used to be super quick boot up, but yesterday it took about 50 seconds. I downloaded Sophos and ran a scan to check for any malware or whatever, and of course nothing came up.

It's also been freezing a little bit when switching between Safari tabs which never happened before.

I ran Activity Monitor and nothing is running high or anything.

Hmm?

EDIT - Might be an obvious thing, but should I just wipe Safari's cookies and all that?

 

[Hellhammer]

Give OnyX a try

 

[NDSMASTER8]

There are any number of reasons that your system could be slowing down. All systems slow down over time as the file systems on your computer build up errors which is why it's generally suggested that you do a fresh reinstall of OS X about once every year. As far as Safari goes, flushing your caches and resetting the browser isn't a bad place to start, but again a fresh installation with the discs that came with your computer should solve any problems you're currently experiencing. Time Machine makes it easy to restore your previous system data as well. To search for large and potentially hidden data files, I'd recommend OmniDiskSweeper which will list all of your system and user data in descending order based on file size and allow you to "destroy" excess information within the application.

Hopefully this helps!

 

[Herb Dorklift]

Hellhammer - Great stuff, I'll check that out when I can What does it do? I can't go on the Apple site right now, so I can't read about it!

NDS - I shouldn't have to do any re-install just yet, but I'll check out OmniDiskSweeper!

 

[Hellhammer]

OnyX can do plenty of maintenance stuff like verify the disk, repair permissions, clear caches etc. Most caches will be cleared by OS X at some point and disk things can be done with Disk Utility but OnyX is a handy tool that can do everything.

It's always worth a try when experiencing slow downs.

 

[Yaboze]

When this happened to me once I did a Check Permissions in the Disk Utility program (then Repair). It takes a while but it helped.