Macbook Pro slow with video and music

Hey there guys,

I have recently been having problems with the Macbook Pro, 13", 2.4 GHz, Snow Leopard, that I purchased in June '10. When I first got the notebook, everything was blazing fast and I was very happy with everything.

Recently, in the past couple of months, my Mac has been slow to respond to certain things:

1. when playing music/video in iTunes or Chrome, there is a 3-5 second lag before i can close or stop playback

2. Microsoft office 2007 also has lag. Sometimes when I type, it takes 5 seconds before the letters I typed actually show up!

I have done the following things to troubleshoot the problem:

1. Zapped the PRAM
2. Repaired disk permissions
3. Repaired disk from installation DVD
4. Updated software

I have the following applications installed, and wonder if they could be a source of the problem?

Nocturne (changes bar on top to black color), Appigo Sync, Dock Library (I have also changed the color of all the dock icons manually)

If someone could give me some tips, I would really appreciate it! This is my first Mac. I was a long-time PC user and was fairly adept at solving problems, but I don't really know much about the Mac OSX.

Thanks,
Leukocyte

Download Onyx and do as many of its maintenance tasks as you wish
Download OnyX for Mac - OS X maintenance & optimization tool. MacUpdate.com

How many fonts to you typically have loaded, or are you not a big heavy font geek

Consider running the latest combo update. It may sound odd to update the software again, but sometimes the combo update refreshes the system more than incremental software updates.

Mac OS X 10.5.6 Combo Update

Thanks so much for your reply. I will download the combo update and keep my fingers crossed. If it's not too much to ask, could you explain more about what OnyX is? Would I be treading on thin ice if I started altering things that I'm not exactly sure about? As I said before...not very competent in OSX compared to Windows.

Thanks Again!

Well, I downloaded the Combo Update, but when I tried to install it, I got the message:

"Mac OS X Update Combined can't be installed on this disk. This volume does not meet the requirements for this update"

?? Any suggestions?

Louishen accidentally gave you the 10.5.6 combo update instead of the 10.6.5 combo update.
Here you go
Mac OS X v10.6.5 Update (Combo)

Leukocyte said:

2. Microsoft office 2007 also has lag. Sometimes when I type, it takes 5 seconds before the letters I typed actually show up!

Click to expand...

I take it you're talking about Office 2008 which, when I used it (I have since upgraded to 2011) was quite slow. Having to wait once in a while for it to catch up wasn't frequent but it did happen enough (especially right after opening a document).

Leukocyte said:

Nocturne (changes bar on top to black color), Appigo Sync, Dock Library (I have also changed the color of all the dock icons manually)

Click to expand...

Not sure what those are but the software that changes things that shouldn't be changed (menu bar and certain dock icons) could be causing you issues. Remove those but do so properly (if it came with an uninstaller, use that).

I installed the new combo update and downloaded Onyx. I used Onyx to clean out some of the cache files, etc. Overall, my notebook seems to be running better, but I can't really be sure until I use it for a few days.

For now though, thank you all for helping me out! I really appreciate it.