Slow multi tasking 4G RAM

Hi all,

First time here.

Just wanted some advice. My 1 year old MacBook (4Gb RAM with Leopard, TimeMachine) has recently been showing some strange behaviour. When it wakens from sleep it takes quite a while (approx 10 minutes) before I can freely flick between applications (photoshop CS4, illustrator CS4 etc) without being delayed by the 'kaleidoscope' type spinning cursor. This is quite annoying cos it really slows me down. After a while the system seems to free itself up and works normally for a while. After a while again it slows down and navigating between apps returns to the same behaviour as previously described.

Are there any 'house keeping' tasks I can do to try to relieve this?

Please suggest anything that may help.

Regards
Geoff

Welcome!
Here's some light reading, tips, etc... to start with. Some articles are a little outdated, but perform about the same. Leopard has automated some of the maintenance scripts better than previous OS's, but this should start you in the right direction. When repairing permissions in Leopard, be warned that it takes quite awhile. (30 mins or more, on occasion) Set up some free time before running these maintenance scripts, etc...

Maintaining Mac OS X
Titanium Software
The Repair functions of Disk Utility: what's it all about?
About Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions feature
Running Mac OS X Maintenance Scripts

Hi soulwar!

Thanks for this! I appreciate you taking the time to reply!

I will definately have a look at this and see if it makes much of a difference! I have since discovered that part of my problem was due to Parallels! When it wasnt running I had a significant increase in performance!

Thanks again!

I was just telling a friend tonight how my brand new macbook sometimes takes forever to load pages. He told me to check my activity monitor and to look for anything red and anything using more than 10 of my CPU. It turned out that using Firefox has likely been slowing me way down. Idk, I just did this now... but I'm hoping it has helped! Maybe the same thing can help you! I'm sure my instructions are pretty crude, but if you look around on the internet you can probably find more specific instructions for what your Activity Monitor should look like.