O/S Is Slow & Getting Worse

We have a 1 yr old laptop with Lepord installed.

We do a lot on our laptop everyday. We use it for work and personal use (always on it).

Just recently is seems like it has gotten slower and seems to be getting worse. I emptied the cache in the Safari but everything seems slow.

Is there any utilities like in Windows (defrag) that I can run to clean it up?

Also, I need a bigger screen do to spreadsheets - Can I just buy a keyboard, mouse & screen and hook it all up to the laptop and just run it off of it? Am I able to enable the laptop to stay on when I shut the lid?

Thanks ;D

The Fuz

Ok....
1.download onyx to do the maint you want .Apple - Downloads - System/Disk Utilities - OnyX

2.Yes to all ...once you have all the peripherals set up put the system to sleep by closing the "lid" and then wake up with the keyboard , but why not keep both screens up to use the real estate?

Hope this helps
Clay

Fuzzy Z said:

We have a 1 yr old laptop with Lepord installed.

We do a lot on our laptop everyday. We use it for work and personal use (always on it).

Just recently is seems like it has gotten slower and seems to be getting worse. I emptied the cache in the Safari but everything seems slow.

Is there any utilities like in Windows (defrag) that I can run to clean it up?

Click to expand...

Yes. Check out Onyx or MainMenu.

Also, I need a bigger screen do to spreadsheets - Can I just buy a keyboard, mouse & screen and hook it all up to the laptop and just run it off of it? Am I able to enable the laptop to stay on when I shut the lid?

Thanks ;D

The Fuz

Click to expand...

Yes. If it's a standard MacBook, you'll need an adapter for the monitor. MacBook Pros of that vintage have a standard DVI port and they came with an SVGA adapter.

The keyboard and mouse will wake the Mac after you close the lid, enabling you to use it in "clamshell" mode.

Right on I'll give it all a try... but why wouldn't Mac have these utilities already installed and do they help?

Big thanks again!

It does. OS X has a set of maintenance scripts that run automatically in the middle of the night if the machine is left turned on. The problem is, most people turn their machines off or let them sleep. These utilities allow you to force them to run at a time of your choosing.

Additionally, there are a number of other things that can make your Mac slow down over time. Fragmentation isn't really a problem unless you're running your hard drive at or near capacity. As long as it's less than 80% of capacity, it should be fine. If you have lots of programs that run at startup, those programs consume system resources and will slow things down. And finally, if you have ever shut your machine down forcibly, without going through the normal shutdown sequence, you might have some disk corruption that you can clear up by running the verify/repair disk and verify/repair permissions processes in Disk Utility.

I recently upgraded to leopard and am having nothing but problems. the system is sluggish at best and after a while the screen starts to roll and frame, kind of like a slideshow. New windows roll out slowly and if I'm watching something with quicktime the sound begins stuttering. It's driving me nuts. I had leopard installed when I recently had the machine checked and overhauled. I'm going to try going back to Tiger. I'm using an early macbook 2GHz with 2 gigs of ram. It just occured to me that maybe the extra ram i had installed may be at fault

geriko said:

I recently upgraded to leopard and am having nothing but problems. the system is sluggish at best and after a while the screen starts to roll and frame, kind of like a slideshow. New windows roll out slowly and if I'm watching something with quicktime the sound begins stuttering. It's driving me nuts. I had leopard installed when I recently had the machine checked and overhauled. I'm going to try going back to Tiger. I'm using an early macbook 2GHz with 2 gigs of ram. It just occured to me that maybe the extra ram i had installed may be at fault

Click to expand...

Did you do an upgrade from Tiger, or a clean install (or archive & install)? If you just popped in the disc and let it upgrade the existing installation, be aware that this is widely known to cause performance and stability issues. It is highly recommended to do a clean install (or archive & install, which retains your files/documents/data/apps, but does a clean install of the OS itself).