New Macbook slowing down

I recently got my first Macbook 2.4GHz, 2GB, Mac OS X 10.6.4, switching from Windows and Linux.
The first week everything was ideal.

Once I started using it, though, which included two things:
Installation of XCode and Iphone SDK and Office2008
Loading photos on iPhoto.
the machine started slowing down. Starting up time more than tripled, and two-finger scrolling is not smooth anymore, but it seems to be with extra 'friction'. This behaviour appears at any application, safari, finder etc. It seems quite odd and disappointing to me, as the macbook is less than a month old. Also, this started in conjunction with iphoto becoming unresponsive several times, while trying to import photos, or while editing photos.
In particular, the scrolling worsened one day I was on a train and working on iPhoto, exporting a slideshow to mpeg. Could this have caused any permanent damage to the hard drive?

Repaired disk permissions, but no improvement noticed.
Logged on with another account and almost no improvement.

Has anybody encountered any similar problem?
Any ideas?

Many thanks!

It could be any number of issues. First thing to do is run the Apple Hardware Test.
Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test

If that checks out, use Disk Utility to verify the drive and check the SMART status.

If that all checks out, then you may need to consider reinstalling OS X. The .4 update may have some unforeseen bug that you are encountering. In that case, consider a clean install and download the 10.6.3 combo update. However, this should only be a last resort.
Mac OS X v10.6.3 v1.1 Update (Combo)

If you imported a lot (and I do mean a LOT) of photos and other media, you may need to look at defragmenting the drive. I recommend trying iDefrag. They have a trial version that will give you an idea of how fragmented your drive may be, but otherwise is too limited (in the trial mode) to actually defrag anything. You can read this thread I started with more info about defragging on OS X.
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os...87952-defragging-os-x-discussion-example.html

I just did a quick search, and it looks like there are problems with iPhoto in 10.6.4
Apple - Support - Discussions - picture editing worse in 10.6.4 ...

There was an existing problem in 10.6.3 that should have been fixed with 10.6.4. The best advice at the moment is to download the combo 10.6.4 update and reapply that. Do NOT reinstall the OS... just apply this combo update:
Mac OS X v10.6.4 Update (Combo)

Many thanx for this.
I will give it a go.

lifeisabeach thank you once again for your help.

Apple Hardware Test showed everything in good shape.
Also the S.M.A.R.T. status is Verified.
Now I recall that I had an external hard drive dying out and was forced to copy an amount of miscelaneous data (datafiles, pictures, office, etc. all created in Windows) of ~70GB to macbook's desktop. Some days later I deleted these files, but didnt see any improvement in performance.
Do you think this might be the problem? Tested fragmentation with iDefrag but did not notice any problem.

Applied Mac OS X 10.6.4 Update, with no luck. Scrolling is even worse now...

It seems format is the only way. Are there any dangers with reinstalling Mac OS X?

acheron said:

lifeisabeach thank you once again for your help.

Apple Hardware Test showed everything in good shape.
Also the S.M.A.R.T. status is Verified.
Now I recall that I had an external hard drive dying out and was forced to copy an amount of miscelaneous data (datafiles, pictures, office, etc. all created in Windows) of ~70GB to macbook's desktop. Some days later I deleted these files, but didnt see any improvement in performance.
Do you think this might be the problem? Tested fragmentation with iDefrag but did not notice any problem.

Applied Mac OS X 10.6.4 Update, with no luck. Scrolling is even worse now...

It seems format is the only way. Are there any dangers with reinstalling Mac OS X?

Click to expand...

Hnmm. Yeah, I can only guess that you are facing a reformat. Naturally, keep a full backup of everything. Ideally, clone your drive using Superduper to an external, then format your internal drive and reinstall OS X. You can then migrate all your user data back as part of the install process off that clone. At this time, I'd stick to 10.6.3 v1.1 for now. If that does work flawlessly for you, then you can consider cloning it again to your backup drive and try 10.6.4. If your problems recur, just restore the backup that is known to be good.