Why is my MacBook so slow ??

[paulsenglish]

Hi.

I have 4 year old Core 2 Duo 13inch which had been getting slower and slower over the last 6 months or so. It stopped completely a few weeks ago, so I took it to Apple and they ran a diagnostic on it, but all including the HD, came up ok.

I wiped the hard drive and reinstalled Snow Leopard, so it was back to about 20GB of an 80GB capacity. It worked at near normal speed, but 2 weeks later is slowing again.

Can anyone give an idea what is going on ?

I've never doubted the staff at Apple, though they do change a lot, but it should work at normal speed if all is ok, surely !!

Is the diagnostic faulty ? I have a 5 year old Core Duo which works much faster which a much fuller memory.

Would appreciate any ideas.

Thanks

 

[blackburn]

Your hard drive might be getting slow, it has happened to me. But still there are a lot of things that can cause slowness like overheating. Has your mac been overheating? How much ram do you have?

 

[ratzzo]

Taking it back to the Apple store once more is the best solution. It could be anything, from the HDD dying to a transistor getting sulfated on the logic board. If you wiped the HDD and it went back to normal, I think it's the HDD itself the one at fault here

 

[accessoriesguy]

4 years, you should try cleaning the computer out, remove the dust. Its cheap, and lets your computer run cooler, because no computer performs well hot.

Although I also agree the hard drive may be letting up, especially since you have already done a restore.

 

[logana]

I wiped the hard drive and reinstalled Snow Leopard, so it was back to about 20GB of an 80GB capacity. It worked at near normal speed, but 2 weeks later is slowing again.

Do you mean that you had 20GB free hard disk space - you are using 60GB out of 80GB total ?

If so you really need more free hard disc space (and probably more ram too).

Sounds as if the hard disk is failing - buy another (larger) drive and see if that helps - I am sure it will.

I also agree that a good clean out inside the machine will help too.

 

[paulsenglish]

Why is my MacBook so slow ??

Thanks, people.

Helpful comments. I'll go back to Apple.

Paul

 

[grugory]

The same problem

I have the same computer (2008 Macbook 13" 2.16GHz 2 Core 2 Duo 1 Gb SDRAM) and I'm having the same problems.

The computer works fine in Word etc. but changing between programs, running Firefox are all glacially slow.

I've reinstalled 10.6.8 and while that worked for about a day, it has since slowed down so much that I'm considering a return to pen and paper.

I'm not sure whether just to upgrade to a Mac Air but I'm not confident that its speed will be enough. Its not like I'm doing graphics or gaming, just webbrowsing and word processing.

 

[chrisman]

Do you hear any clicking noises? As that is a normal sign of a hard drive failure.

 

[dcorban]

If you only have 1GB RAM and switching between programs is slow, then you just need more RAM. Microsoft Word and Firefox in particular use an extremely high amount of RAM.

 

[winston1236]

If you only have 1GB RAM and switching between programs is slow, then you just need more RAM. Microsoft Word and Firefox in particular use an extremely high amount of RAM.

Yea 1gb ram guarantee's you will have a slow time doing anything. For instance my Mac will be using 1.5gb just sitting here with me not doing anything. You need a ram upgrade desperately.

 

[hraven]

If you only have 1GB RAM and switching between programs is slow, then you just need more RAM. Microsoft Word and Firefox in particular use an extremely high amount of RAM.

Yeah, until I actually started using Word on here I never would have suspected that Word would use as much as it does … but, oh yeah, that thing uses a TON, I have 4 GB ram and Word still take longer than most everything else to start.