Wife's Macbook Running Slow...

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Your Mac's Specs
13" Macbook 1gb ram; 320gb hd iPhone 4s 16gb iPod Nano 16gb iPod Mini 6gb
My wife and I have had our Macbooks for a few years now (she's had hers a little longer than I), and they were identical, except that we ordered mine with the superdrive DVD burner. They have the 2.0 Ghz core duo processor and 1 gig of RAM. They came with OSX 10.4, but I recently upgraded mine to SL and went to a 320GB hard drive after my original 80 GB after drive crashed.

My wife's Macbook has never played videos well (lots of stopping and spinning pinwheels), and recently Safari seems to be closing suddenly. I know these problems are probably not related, but I was hoping to get some feedback in how to deal with either or both of these problems. Our computers' behavior has recently got my attention after losing everything on my hard drive and I'm motivated to deal with problems sooner rather than later now. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
-Mark
 
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chas_m

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I would replace the hard drive in her machine (sounds like it's failing) and would increase the RAM in both your and her machines to at least 2GB. And of course she should be upgraded to 10.6 as well.

You will probably both get better performance from videos if you'll use a HTML5 extension for Safari (or FF) that forces HTML5 video instead of Flash where possible.

Also, you mention that these MacBooks are "a few years old." Mine is from mid-2007 and I've finally gotten to the point where I do feel I need to replace it soon. Perhaps that's another option to consider, at least for your wife's machine.

Finally, your post implies that neither of you make backups. Why in heaven's name would you take that risk when external HDs are so insanely cheap, and the software to do so so automatic and easy?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
13" Macbook 1gb ram; 320gb hd iPhone 4s 16gb iPod Nano 16gb iPod Mini 6gb
Our Macbooks were from mid-2006. Would it be money well spent to upgrade? I guess it would be about 45.00 per computer to bring them up to 2GB of RAM and another $45-50 for a HD for my wife's machine. In addition to that, we'd put $30 into SL for her. No good excuse for not backing up the hard drives. I did try to use Carbonite before mine crashed, but couldn't make it work. Lesson learned.
 

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