Macbook running incredibly slow

Hey everyone. I am going to apologize in advance if this thread is a run-on of another, but I am at my wits end. I recently came back from a 9 month deployment overseas, in which i had taken my computer. As you would think, the WiFi in the Indian Ocean is sluggish...who knew? Well I was not able to update anything or really do anything with my Macbook besides charge my iPhone and iPod and all that.

Well, since I have returned my Macbook has never run the same. Whenever I boot my Mac, it will work fluently for about 1.5 minutes, and then BOOM. NOTHING. Just the "Load" symbol (spinning gear) and thats it. I do not run any memory extensive programs, I literally only run iTunes and Safari. I updated my Mac too all the most recent versions, and even recently installed Lion. The install went ok, but I still can't do a THING with my computer! I have taken it in to the geniuses and they just an some tests and determined my hardware is not the issue. Even now, I am writing this post from "Safe Mode" which is the only way that I can use my computer now.

Any and ALL support/information will be GREATLY appreciated. I have attached a basic overview of my system. And I am also using "MainMenu"

Thank you.

Why are you using MainMenu? What makes you think OS X needs 3rd party help to run maintenance scripts and keep itself optimized? I advise uninstalling it first of all.

northrnchimp said:

Why are you using MainMenu? What makes you think OS X needs 3rd party help to run maintenance scripts and keep itself optimized? I advise uninstalling it first of all.

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The only reason I am using that is because my MacBook was running so slow. I downloaded that program yesterday, and it has been no help! I will uninstall it but that will have no effect on the machine.

How full is the hard drive?

chas_m said:

How full is the hard drive?

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I have 51GB free

I have also been having the spinning beach ball problems a lot on my Imac, have 60GB of memory on the hard drive - also have 3 G drives in series on the Firewire port on the machine to back up photos and a single portable drive usb connection.

I see Mac Sweeper advertised, is this advisable to try and "clean" out the cobwebs?

dave.shrack said:

The only reason I am using that is because my MacBook was running so slow. I downloaded that program yesterday, and it has been no help! I will uninstall it but that will have no effect on the machine.

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There's nothing wrong with running MainMenu or OnyX. They're both actually helpful to run once in awhile. Leave it be.

Open your Activity Monitor and see what else may be running or possibly eating up your CPU and slowing things down.

Another thing which can slow the machine down is a bad or flakey hard drive. Make sure you run Disk Utility from your install media and do a verify and repair on the hard drive.