Macbook running slow

[margotb822]

I have a MacBook and it has been running slow lately. And ideas on how to get it back up to speed? I know with PCs you can run the defragmenter, but is there something like that for Macs? I am pretty new to macs, so I apologize if I'm clueless...

[Elwood P Dowd]

1. 52 ways to speed up your Mac

http://www.imafish.co.uk/articles/post/articles/130/52-ways-to-speed-up-os-x

[moggie]

2. I'm afraid I pretty much stopped reading that list after the first item

His number one tip for speeding up your Mac is "repair disk permissions". Aargh, no! This will have no effect on the system's speed. Sadly, repairing disk permissions has become a kind of snake oil in the OS X world, regularly trotted out as a panacea. When someone advocates it as a possible fix for performance problems, you should take everything they say with a large pinch of salt!

[moggie]

3. Defragging is rarely needed

The HFS+ filesystem typically used with Macs doesn't suffer too much from fragmentation problems. Apple has an article here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

Is your disk almost full? And how much memory do you have?

If your Mac is running slow, you can ask it to tell you what it's doing. In the 'Utilities' folder under 'Applications' is 'Activity Monitor', which will display what processes are running, how much CPU they are taking, and various other information. This can help you spot rogue processes which are taking up an unexpected amount of CPU. Typically, when you're not running any other applications, Activity Monitor itself will show up as the top process, and the system will be at least 97% idle. I had a problem a while ago where my iMac would periodically get sluggish, and Activity Monitor showed that it was caused by SSHKeychain (a third-party utility I use) occasionally going bananas and using a lot of processor (fixed in a later version). If you do find a process which looks very busy, you may not recognise it, but it gives you something to google for.

Some dashboard widgets can consume CPU even when not on the desktop, so if you've installed any new widgets lately, that's one thing to consider.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

4. clearing out caches works wonders.

I do that daily.

[alfredo]

5. Macs do maintenance late at night. Laptops are usually off then.

Open your terminal in Utilities and type:


sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

hit return. It will prompt for your password. Type it in and let it do its magic. It will look like it is doing nothing for a long time. Don't worry. When it is done the prompt will return.

Let us know if it works.

[Elwood P Dowd]

6. You could also download the free Mac Janitor and do the same thing.

Many Mac newbies are not comfortable with terminal.

[alfredo]

7. It doesn't run on Leopard, but great for older versions of OSX. I used to

use it all the time.

[Elwood P Dowd]

8. I forgot all about that. I'm still running Tiger so it just didn't dawn on me

the poster might have Leopard. I had some strange problem a few months ago and fixed it with Apple Jack. Can't remember the details, but after running AJ it was fixed. Back in the OS 8 and OS 9 days I often used DiskWarrior along with TechTool to keep things running smooth. With Panther and now Tiger, I've never bothered with those two.

[alfredo]

9. Anyway, the command is simple and once you type it in, you can scroll

back by hitting the up arrow, find the command and run the scripts without typing.

[Pierre.Suave]

10. Here is a link to an...

Automator action that runs OSX's built in maintenance utilities.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/maintenance.html

It comes with a version for Leopard and Tiger, choose which you need, click it and let it run.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

11. Cache Out is a shareware program I use

even on leapard.

and at least once a week, use your disk utility to repair permissions.