Major problem with a white Macbook, bought 2009

Hello, I'm in need of great help here, the past few months my Macbook has been running slower and slower. I have 2 gigs of ram, but it feels like somethings wrong with it. Around 2009, I installed World Of Warcraft I could play it on Very High quality, so a few months ago I tested it again, And I could barely run it at low, and got constant 5-10 FPS. Has anyone else had this problem.... It just feels like the macbook's dying or something, Help please ! I've tried loads of stuff, Disk utility, Maccleaner, deleting Cache, I even reinstalled the entire computer and it still running slow. I've been checking the internet daily for a fix of some sort, help please !


Edit: Oh and by the way, whenever I restart the computer you can notice a difference in the performance, it's a lot faster, but then just stops working as good as it used to be after a few minutes.

The last part of your post seems to be the key.

Sounds like something is running on startup that's hogging CPU, RAM and or disk activity.

Bring up Activity Monitor and see which processes are using the most of these resources.

That'll give you a place to start

mrplow said:

The last part of your post seems to be the key.

Sounds like something is running on startup that's hogging CPU, RAM and or disk activity.

Bring up Activity Monitor and see which processes are using the most of these resources.

That'll give you a place to start

Click to expand...

I have it up right at the moment. Kernel task is using 185 MB, other then that I can't see anything out of the ordinary, what should I look for ... ?

Just like my other post said. High CPU, high disk activity.

If you can see nothing using a lot of CPU time or RAM or heavy disk use then your Mac, at this point is presumably running ok......

Start doing what you'd normally do and keep an eye on Activity Monitor once the slow downs start.

Out of interest how do the slow downs manifest themselves? Beachball spinning? not responding to clicks? etc

Akintosh said:

It just feels like the macbook's dying or something, Help please ! I've tried loads of stuff, Disk utility, Maccleaner, deleting Cache

Click to expand...

Found the problem. Uninstall that piece of garbage (properly, using their own instructions for uninstall!).

mrplow said:

Just like my other post said. High CPU, high disk activity.

If you can see nothing using a lot of CPU time or RAM or heavy disk use then your Mac, at this point is presumably running ok......

Start doing what you'd normally do and keep an eye on Activity Monitor once the slow downs start.

Out of interest how do the slow downs manifest themselves? Beachball spinning? not responding to clicks? etc

Click to expand...

Well, the computer in general feels a lot slower then normal, whenever I open a game i could play perfectly fine a few months ago it's constantly running around 5-10 fps.

Edit: So I looked at the monitor, and whenever I launched a game wether it be Minecraft or League of legends who shouldn't really make the computer work as slow as a virus filled Windows computer. It uses all the RAM, what I mean is that when I launch them they only leave 20-200 MB free, and this is whilst everything else is closed. Oh and another thing, now that I think of it when I had World Of Warcraft installed a few months ago the computer automatically set the settings to Very low, or low. I was abit surprised because a few months before that the computer had set them automatically to high, it just feels like the computer is working harder then it should or something. I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense because I'm not a computer pro ... :/

And Chas, what do you mean ? What does that have to do with anything ?

Anyone please ? I've had this problem for about year now... I finally thought I should do something about it, as It's getting fairly annoying.

Akintosh said:

Edit: Oh and by the way, whenever I restart the computer you can notice a difference in the performance, it's a lot faster, but then just stops working as good as it used to be after a few minutes.

Click to expand...

Yes...rebooting the computer can & will help (depending on the problem). Please read the "Beachballs" link in my signature...to get an overview of the various things that can slow your computer down...and what you can do about it.

- Nick

p.s. An additional item that can slow down a Mac (not mentioned in the link)...is if the hard drive is getting too full.

pigoo3 said:

Yes...rebooting the computer can & will help (depending on the problem). Please read the "Beachballs" link in my signature...to get an overview of the various things that can slow your computer down...and what you can do about it.

- Nick

p.s. An additional item that can slow down a Mac (not mentioned in the link)...is if the hard drive is getting too full.

Click to expand...

Hello Nick, my Macbook never gets ''Beachballs'' It just feels a lot slower then it should, I checked your link, and you mentioned something about Page Out and Swap used, they are both around 40 mb, so that doesn't exactly help me. I have 2 gigs of ram on this Macbook, and when I only have Google Chrome on, but the Activity Monitor shows that the computer is using 1 gigs of ram, Is that something to go on ... ? I have no idea what the problem could be, but I intend to get it fixed as I can't deal with it anymore, and I never have the spinning beachball problem, as I said before, It just feels A LOT slower. I even Formatted my Harddrive yesterday to no luck...

Ok, I also have WoW installed on my Mac and it still works pretty good. That's because I have 6gb of ram on my system. If you read the min requirements for WoW they are getting higher as new expansions come out and the game gets more complicated. That game is graphics intense so the first problem I would say is you need to get some more RAM because I have a 2008 MBP and it still works fine so your graphics card probably isn't the problem. If you only have 25MB left free that is for sure what is slowing the system down.

DrEwTiMe42o said:

Ok, I also have WoW installed on my Mac and it still works pretty good. That's because I have 6gb of ram on my system. If you read the min requirements for WoW they are getting higher as new expansions come out and the game gets more complicated. That game is graphics intense so the first problem I would say is you need to get some more RAM because I have a 2008 MBP and it still works fine so your graphics card probably isn't the problem. If you only have 25MB left free that is for sure what is slowing the system down.

Click to expand...

Well, I don't have WoW installed anymore, it could be what you're saying that the graphics are improving, but that still doesn't explain why my computer automatically has 25-200 MB left of RAM after launching a game... ? Which shouldn't take that much, such as Minecraft or League of legends.

What does your computer have free before launching these games? I know that when I had to many apps open with 2gb I ran into the problem just by having things like word,excel,Firefox etc open at the same time. If when you log in and open nothing else and it does that then there is an issue..

Also, when you open apps repeatedly and don't restart your computer the ram used to open those apps becomes wired. What this means is that the ram is not currently used but is in a way saved for those apps so they open faster the next time you open them. So even if you have nothing open but have not restarted you may experience this issue with little free ram.

DrEwTiMe42o said:

What does your computer have free before launching these games? I know that when I had to many apps open with 2gb I ran into the problem just by having things like word,excel,Firefox etc open at the same time. If when you log in and open nothing else and it does that then there is an issue..

Also, when you open apps repeatedly and don't restart your computer the ram used to open those apps becomes wired. What this means is that the ram is not currently used but is in a way saved for those apps so they open faster the next time you open them. So even if you have nothing open but have not restarted you may experience this issue with little free ram.

Click to expand...

Right at this second it has 870 MB free, I have nothing else active. And I restart the computer all the time, so I don't think that's an issue...

That's not so much free. Figure that Firefox with a couple tabs open will take 200mb and if you have any other apps open then a game you would be cutting it close. It may just be time to get yourself some more ram.

DrEwTiMe42o said:

That's not so much free. Figure that Firefox with a couple tabs open will take 200mb and if you have any other apps open then a game you would be cutting it close. It may just be time to get yourself some more ram.

Click to expand...

Thought so, could this be a fan problem of some sort though ? The computer Is clearly using too much Ram for no reason ... ?