Terrible slow downs...

It started yesterday for some reason. Every 20 or so it will pop up with the rainbow spinny thing and completely lock up. Another 20 or so seconds goes by and it will be fine. Its really hard typing this.

Whenever I play music or movies the spinner comes up the same. When the movies start to play they dont pick up where they leave off, instead it skips ahead like itd been playing the whole time.

I have no idea what to do. I used Onyx to clean my system, but it didnt help. Id love to have some help.

My specs:
Macbook - 2.13 GHZ Core2Duo
80 GB HDD - 20gigs free
1GB MEMory

Check out the istat pro widgit or activity monitor. And have a lot at your page out number. If that's a large number it could be you need more ram to make your machine sun smoother.

It appears that there may be a background process consuming a lot of your CPU. Start up Activity Monitor (in your Utilities folder, type CMD+SHIFT+U to see it), view Your Processes, and then sort by the %CPU column. This will identify for you all processes that are taking up any significant CPU time. You will then have to determine if any of them look odd. I suspect one or more will. Kill them and see what happens.

ok, checked activity moniter. there was no process that seemed out of place. nothing was really eating up my cpu power. in fact it was 97.7% idle on all process and then it froze for a few seconds... and eventually became unfroze.

i decided to download macscan2 to scan for spyware (i was getting desperate). i scanned and found nothing. i then cleaned all my application cache with OnyX.

*THEN something great happened. it quite slowing down so much. i could use finder and safari just fine. it was back to normal. However, when i tried to open quicktime it crashed and gave me a bug report. it did the same with VLC, RealPlayer, and LogicPro.

at this point i decided to restart my computer cause i was desperate to watch some porn.... j/k

when i restarted it booted up fine for a few seconds and now it hangs on a blue screen. it never gets to the login screen. everyonce and a while it will have a small loading dial at the bottom, but it never leads anywhere. its been on for 3 hours now and hasnt done anything. ive tried restarting it over and over again and get nothing... even removed the battery, held the power button, and replaced the battery, it didnt do anything.


this is what i get for running my mouth off at my roommates for having pcs, their laptops crap out atleast twice a week in some way. this is my first major problem with a mac.

This could be a lot of things, but it is starting to sound like a potential hardware issue to me. I was afraid of that in the first posting.

Can you boot off of your Leopard DVD? If you can, that will rule out most things and focus you at a potential hard drive issue. If you CAN boot off of the Leopard DVD, fire up Disk Utility and use it to do a thorough check of your main hard drive. Right now, that would be my guess.

Are you running Leopard or Tiger? If Leopard, did you do an upgrade, an Archive and Install, or a clean install? The upgrade path seems (still) to be fraught with error - perhaps you are seeing some of this in corrupted behavior vs. corrupted hardware.

i upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5 Leopard a few months ago. i use this computer everyday and it gets a lot of use. i used disk utility before the crash to check permissions and every thing was fine...

i dont have my leopard disk anymore though. ill have to borrow one i guess. i really hope it isnt a hardware problem. this is my main computer and im in college right now. if i lose the work i have on it im going to be soooo stressed since the end of the semester is this month

Main computer and you got rid of your Leopard install DVD? Go and buy an install DVD as you cannot survive without it.