How can I speed up my old Mac Book Pro?

How can I speed up my old Mac Book Pro?

I have a Refurbished MacBook Pro, 17-inch, 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo running Mac OS X 10.4.11 bought in 2007.

Its been great but these days is a bit slow and I wondered if there is anything I can do to get it back to its old self? - eg on a PC you can defrag etc.

Any help much appreciated!

How much Ram has it got?

Assuming you have 2 gig or more I would do a fresh install of Snow Leopard, it's stll a cheap upgrade at $30

The best way to regain that lost speed is to start fresh. Back up all your data, format your drive, and reinstall the OS and your applications from their discs. I try to do this every 2-3 years with my machines to rid the drives of problems and fragments which may have crept up over time.

Scott Baret said:

The best way to regain that lost speed is to start fresh. Back up all your data, format your drive, and reinstall the OS and your applications from their discs. I try to do this every 2-3 years with my machines to rid the drives of problems and fragments which may have crept up over time.

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This is a bad habit that many of us bring over for Windows, and quite simply is not remotely necessary with a UNIX-based OS.

If you want a "clean start", so to speak, simply creating a new user account and deleting the old one accomplishes the same thing. This is not Windows where you have a registry to rot or a dlls scattered throughout the system files. Everything is centralized and the user doesn't have the implicit authority to modify the OS in any significant way.

As far as fragmentation goes, if you maintain at least 20% free space, it's not an issue. But don't take my word for that:

About disk optimization with Mac OS X

My recommendation would be to run periodic maintenance with a tool like Onyx. That usually takes care of any slowdowns as the result of normal wear and tear.

cwa107 said:

This is a bad habit that many of us bring over for Windows, and quite simply is not remotely necessary with a UNIX-based OS.

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Exactly what I was thinking when read post #3. Bad advice...is simply bad advice. Just imagine the time & effort (and potential problems) the OP would have gone thru (unnecessarily)...if they had followed that info.

Of course I do understand that this advice does work well in the "Windows World"...I've done it myself.

- Nick

Haha.. Back in my Windows days, me and a really good friend whom is also an tech, used to have a running joke with one another, that is actually based in reality. When one of us was having a problem trying to fix a clients computer and it was taking a bit too long, the answer was always:

"fdisk!"

Makes me laugh to this very day.

Doug

For me, this habit came not from Windows, but from the days of System 6.

It is definitely true that OS X manages a disk better than previous operating systems and makes formatting and defragmentation less necessary than on Windows or pre-OS X Mac OS. I do use Disk Utility on a regular basis to repair anything that may have gone wrong with the hard drive (this actually occurs more frequently than some OS X users would lead you to believe, as it's happened to every OS X computer I've owned except my new MacBook Air). Using OnyX is good too, but in some cases it won't cure all problems.

Yes, it's possible to just create a new user account, but I'd rather have a complete refresh. Call me old-school, but I like to restore my disks to their original state and rid my computer of any extraneous clutter in the process while fixing potential problems with the actual drive. We're talking about drive rot here, not OS rot (which OS X doesn't suffer from to the degree Windows does).

I agree this takes plenty of time and effort, but in the end you rid your drive of potential disk-related problems and make a nice backup of your drive in the process. Remember, too, that each case is different from machine to machine and while alternatives to formatting often will work, starting at square one never hurts.