MacBook Air bogs down on streaming video

My MacBook air is a little over a year old, and I've been very happy with it. Lately though, I've noticed a bit of a performance decrease. It generally runs crisply, but when I'm streaming video, using Firefox, and sometimes even running movies in iTunes, the computer gets very choppy. My auto-hide dock is choppy coming up, the video is choppy, mouse scrolling and web page scrolling. I've checked the activity monitor and nothing seems to be eating up resources, I dont run a bunch of programs at once, its pretty spartan. This is my first Mac so I dont know much about general maintenance and haven't really ever cleaned up the hard drive, which has about 10 gigs of free space left.
Can anyone tell me why my MacBook Air is running so slowly?

You answered your own question when you said you only have 10 Gb of hard drive space left.

Regards.

The hard drive shouldn't slow anything down. I have been working with 5GB or less for a long time now and I have had no problems.

This seems more like a problem with lack of RAM. How much RAM do you currently have? How many programs do you have open at once?

Also processor speed is a big factor with watching video and as far as I know the Air lacks a bit in that area, it was never meant for anything too intense so watching videos with other programs open and not much RAM could slow things down quite a bit.

Remember that the Air's RAM is soldered in place, so what you have is what you have.

The OP said it used to do videos smooth and just lately is getting choppy. You might try downloading and running Onyx and run the Maintenance scripts.

thank you very much to all who responded. ill try onyx

Do these happen to be flash videos? Flash is a major resource hog (more than it really should be) and as such, may be contributing to the problem.

TheInvsbleMan said:

The hard drive shouldn't slow anything down. I have been working with 5GB or less for a long time now and I have had no problems.

This seems more like a problem with lack of RAM. How much RAM do you currently have? How many programs do you have open at once?

Also processor speed is a big factor with watching video and as far as I know the Air lacks a bit in that area, it was never meant for anything too intense so watching videos with other programs open and not much RAM could slow things down quite a bit.

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I watch videos without choppieness on macs much slower than an MBA. The precessor shouldn't cause much of a problem unless you're getting into real heavy stuff. And yes, its not HDD. I agree, it is probably a RAM thing.

How much RAM do you have?
Does this problem happen in other browsers too? I've noticed that firefox (on;y the mac version) seems to be more choppy than safari or camino.


EDIT: Oh nevermind if RAM is soldered. Man I've always been a big MBA fan and I always hear people complaining about lack of USB (which i don't really care about), but it has soldered RAM. That annoys me.