1.5 year old Macbook is running quite slow

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First off let me say sorry for posting before doing a thorough search. I tried searching several times and it kept bringing me to a blank page. So I will be more than happy if all you do is point me to a previous post if you feel it is applicable.

My computer is running slower and slower by the day. I would say it takes around 2 minutes from the time I hit the power button to the time that the OS is fully loaded and I am able to start using applications. It could be closer to 3 minutes though, I have never timed it. It takes another 30-45 seconds from the time I click on Firefox for example to the time that I am actually able to start using it. Most of that time is spent just watching a bouncing fox and a beach ball. Parallels 5 isn't of much use anymore either. When I first installed Windows 7 under Parallels it didn't run so hot but once I upgraded to a full 4GB of RAM it ran great. This was about 10 months ago and it is practically useless now. I have a 250GB HDD which is only 3/5 full so I don't think that could be a problem. I have run all the disk utilities that I could think of. I checked it for data errors and it found a few but fixed them. SMART says everything looks good and I also fixed all the permissions (btw what the **** kind of problem is that? Who is messing with my permissions?) but it is still really slow. I used Onyx to clear all the caches along with just about every other process Onyx is capable of doing. Right now I am running Memtest in single user mode for the second time but it didn't find any errors the first time so I doubt it will this time. I don't know where else to look. Can anyone suggest anything?
 
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Running any kind of AV program and a clustered up desktop will slow things down also
if you shut it down instead of letting it sleep periodically it can't run maintenance scripts correctly.
 
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What do you mean "shut it down instead of letting it sleep periodically?" Why can't I do both? This machine gets plenty of time to sleep. Several hours a day I would say. I don't use any kind of AV program and I have exactly two folders on my Desktop. That's it.
 

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I'm guessing it's a HDD issue. From the sound of it, it could be just that your HDD is getting way full...or it's failing. Time to back up your stuff if you haven't already.
 
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Backup and reinstall is probably the ultimate thing to do.

- Simon
 
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According to the sticky at the top of this forum, that is almost never required. I would like to think Apple did a little better job on Snow Leopard than that. I have a desktop with Windows XP installed on it that has never crashed, never had a virus and never even seen any anti-virus software. I beat the **** out of that thing and it's never taken me more than a few hours to get that thing back to normal when something starts to slow it down. I'll have to disagree with all the "OS X is better than Windows" talk (for now). Hopefully someone who knows what they are doing can reform me :)
 
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Back to my old 2.2GHz C2D MB after selling my MBP and wondering what my next Mac will be :)
Apple did a great job with Snow Leopard, and this has nothing to do with the OS.
Could be corrupt files on your HD, a near full HD, or the RAM.
We know it's not a full HD since you say you have 100GB free space.
I would try setting up a new user account and seeing if that plays nice just to rule out your user account.
Back up your data.
Now, start off by booting off your install disc, going to utilities/disc utilities in the menu bar after selecting the language and verify and repair the disc.
 
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How do you know it has nothing to do with the OS? I am assuming you didn't even read my original post because in there I stated that I had already tried everything you suggested short of creating a new user account.
 
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Back to my old 2.2GHz C2D MB after selling my MBP and wondering what my next Mac will be :)
Because I and millions of others have been using this OS since it came out!
I read your post, and you mentioned nothing of verifying and repairing your disk! ;P
 
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"I have run all the disk utilities that I could think of. I checked it for data errors and it found a few but fixed them. SMART says everything looks good"

And in response to your theory that the quality of the OS is measured by the number of users... well by that logic Windows is 10 times better. I'm not saying Windows is better though, I'm just saying your logic is Junk.
 
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"I have run all the disk utilities that I could think of. I checked it for data errors and it found a few but fixed them. SMART says everything looks good"
You stated the you ran OnyX which is where you would have had the smart status report.
Once again, you have mentioned nothing of verifying and repairing your disk booted from your install disc!

And in response to your theory that the quality of the OS is measured by the number of users... well by that logic Windows is 10 times better. I'm not saying Windows is better though, I'm just saying your logic is $#it.

I'm not even going to dignify that with a response!
 
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Well I will explicitly mention it now. I inserted the the original Snow Leopard disk and ran the disk utility from there. It said everything was looking good. I guess when I said I ran everything I could think of, you didn't think I was smart enough to think of the most obvious solution.
 
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lol ...maybe try "thank you for your help, I inserted the the original Snow Leopard disk and ran the disk utility from there and ran verify and repair disk but it said everything was looking good!"
You could also try "I guess I'll give a new user account a go and see how that goes."
Then you could also try "if all else fails, I guess I'll do a clean install, and test the system out and see how it runs."
Last but not least, then you could post back and let us know how it all turned out.

Order of things to rule out is generally corrupt files, HD, RAM, Logic Board.

Take what you want from this thread, as it's your Mac, not mine! :)
 

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People here are trying to help you. All you have done is shot back with insults to those people and to OSX. Ditch the attitude please.

And we can't read your mind. That is why questions are asked.

And if all else fails, I would listen to what Crimson said. Getting really slow a lot of times it IS the hard drive starting to fail. I don't care what SMART says. SMART does not always 100% of the time show issues with a hard drive in my years of PC repair experience.
 
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Yeah I'm being a jerk My bad, its an ego thing. I went to school far too long to not be able to figure this out on my own. That and Mac users have left an all around bad taste in my mouth. I judged you guys before I gave you a chance. I'll stop. I already have a secound user set up that I've only logged into once. I'll check it out when I get home.

Again, I'm sorry. That was uncalled for. I occasionally play the tech support role for my own systems and I was acting like the people I hate dealing with.
 

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In addition to what dtravis7 mentioned, I'll ask that we all take a moment and review our Community Guidelines. It's easy to get caught up and become defensive when we feel our favorite platform is being attacked, but I don't feel like the overall tone here is in keeping with our Community Guidelines. I'll admit that much of the problem here is the OP's attitude in the first few posts, but it is certainly perpetuated by the tone of several of the folks who have replied.
 

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Just a few thoughts here...

It does sound very much like a failing drive. Keep in mind that SMART is a set of on-board diagnostics that is supposed to provide a predictive failure assessment based on a number of data points. It is not perfect and should not be the only measure of a drive's stability. The Apple Hardware Test is something else I would recommend trying.

Also, the SMART Utility (trialware) will actually tell you exactly what each SMART criteria are reading. I had a drive that passed cursory SMART tests on a regular basis, but was showing repeated heat and surface errors. I wouldn't have known that had I not looked at a detailed report. Even though I didn't lose any data, I later swapped the drive and the performance was greatly improved.

Additionally, I've found that the "First Aid" utilities in Disk Utility are not as comprehensive as running an fsck in Single User Mode. Not sure if you've been down that road, but I'd recommend running that to repair the filesystem if it's just a matter of some minor corruption. (For details, see Step 9 here).

And lastly, for whatever reason, an occasional PRAM reset can work wonders. Start with the machine powered off, turn the machine on and immediately press and hold Command + Option + P + R. Continue holding until you've heard the startup chime twice and then release.

Good luck to you and keep us posted.
 
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I forgot about the Apple Hardware Test, thank you for the reminder. But I ran it last night and it said that everything was fine. SMART Utility also said it passed. Although when I looked at the detailed report I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at and I couldn't find any answers in the documentation. There are columns called Value, Worst, Threshold, Type, and Raw Value. For most every attribute Value and Worst were equal with numbers right around 100. For type they all say Old age or Pre-fail and then Raw value is 0 on most all of them. What do those columns represent? What am I looking for?

Logging in under a different user didn't make any difference but that was no surprise. The machine is really slow long before you are ever asked to log in.

I reset the PRAM and ran fsck in SUM before I made my first post and that didn't make any difference either.

Right now I am waiting for my desktop to finish partitioning a drive so I can have 500GB dedicated to Timemachine for a network backup. But I don't think Timemachine allows me to create a bootable image. Does anyone know of a program that will? I realize that is not the ideal setup in this situation because I could just be restoring a bad image if this is in fact a software issue rather than a hardware issue (I am still putting all my eggs in the software issue basket) but I would still like to be able to backup bootable images in the future. What all does Timemachine backup anyways? I am guessing it only saves my files and not my applications and settings? I keep everything important under one single directory which is constantly synchronized to a flash drive and then my desktop and then my desktop backs up that directory to multiple drives. I don't use this machine for anything but hardware and software development so there are no pictures, music or videos on here. Other than my applications, there is really only 3GB of important files on here along with a Ubuntu and Windows image for Paralles which takes up the majority of my space.

This thing still has a few months of AppleCare left on it so if I were to take it in and they determined that the drive was failing I could get a new one. But how will they determine its failing? Do they have any more tools at their disposal than I have already run? Cause all the tools say the drive is fine so I am afraid if I take it in they may just tell me the drive is fine.
 

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With Time Machine if you back up the whole drive, if you insert the OSX DVD in the drive and go to the install menu, there is a command to restore from the Time Machine backup. I have done it a few times when upgrading to a new hard drive. After the restore the machine will boot up and be just like it was with the old drive.

If you want a program that will do a stand alone bootable backup, Carbon Copy Cloner will do exactly what you want and make a total bootable backup to an external drive. There is also Super Duper. Both will do what you want but I am partial to Carbon Copy.

Carbon Copy Cloner


Super Duper
 
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If all else fails download a little Utility called AppleJack from SourceForge, print and read the directions and run in single user mode in the Applejack AUTO restart mode. It is a great little trouble shooting utility and if necessary you can also run in the Deep Clean Mode.


http://applejack.sourceforge.net/
 

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