Huge MacBook Pro Issue - Please Help

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I'm guessing that I'm going to have to bring this in to get it look at, but here goes nothing.

I got my 15" MBP in Spring of 2006. I've always taken good care of it, but I've literally logged thousands of hours on it. Despite all of the use, it's been taken care of and always performed admirably until I installed two things recently: Leopard and Time Machine.

My computer was running relatively problem free. I knew that I had to clear some hard drive space because I was already running at 60 gb with only 20 gb free, but I wanted to get it all backed up using Time Machine first so I proceeded with the Leopard install.

Essentially the install took about 45 minutes and then I was prompted to backup my system with an extrenal hard drive. I plugged my external in and the process of backing everything up started. This took excruciatingly long and I finally stopped it at 28% after 4 hours.

Now here is where I am at. I have Leopard installed with my hard drive at about 92% of capacity (about 6 gb free) and only 28% of my HD backed up.

Here are my problems (and there are a lot of them):
Fan runs constantly
If the computer goes into sleep mode it will fire back up when you reactivate it, but then instantly shut down.
The power button must be held for 6-7 seconds to get the computer to turn on and stay on without turning right off again.
Once the computer fires up the screen brightness instantly goes off and you have to put it back up again.
Volume always starts off and the volume up button does not work on the keybroad (though the volume down button works as does turning up the volume on the screen)
Streaming video on the internet is awful. You only get an update every .5-.8 seconds. That is true for live streaming (baseball) and YouTube.
Everything runs very slow. There is a lot of cursor and key ghosting where I'll do stuff and then the computer will finially catch up after about 30 seconds (literally) and do everything I told it to.
Applications take much too long to open. (Safari bounces between 20-30 times before a window pops up)
Battery life seems short too.



I know that's a laundry list, but can someone at least point me in the right direction? I imagine it's going to require something extreme, but is there any chance this is all software and memory related?
 
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15" MacBook Pro (Early 2008) 2.4GHz 4GB RAM running 10.5.4
Definitely book yourself a slot at the genius bar and take it to an Apple Store near you. Do you have AppleCare?
 
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Redo your install of Leopard. Use the archive and install option when you do it. The straight up upgrade option can cause trouble sometimes especially if something on your Tiger install was not Leopard compatible.
 

cwa107


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14" MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD
Redo your install of Leopard. Use the archive and install option when you do it. The straight up upgrade option can cause trouble sometimes especially if something on your Tiger install was not Leopard compatible.

Agreed, it's well documented that doing a straight upgrade typically causes issues.

I would also strongly recommend that you make a backup before making major changes to the system as a rule of thumb. It's always nice to have the option to revert back in the event that something doesn't go well.
 

chscag

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To add to the very good advice you received......

I recommend upgrading your MBP internal HD before installing Leopard again. There's no point doing an OS upgrade if the amount of HD space left over is not adequate enough to do anything. I believe some of the problems you were experiencing were caused by lack of drive space. Unix operating systems are hefty in size, and Mac OS X with each iteration uses more drive space. With today's prices for HDs being what they are, it's a good opportunity to purchase and install a new HD.

I realize installing a new HD in a MBP is not something easily done by the user and may entail labor costs to have Apple do it. However, I still believe it's worth it especially if you intend to keep the machine for awhile longer.

Regards.
 

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