brand new macbook pro getting slower?

hi i just bought a brand new macbook pro in october, it has a 500 gb hard drive and 4gb of ram. it seems like startups are taking a lot longer and the color wheel is appearing all the time now even for simple tasks. it also says i have over 479 gb of space left and i really don't have that many programs? any body know how to speed it back up again?? thank you for replies.

hislip33 said:

hi i just bought a brand new macbook pro in october, it has a 500 gb hard drive and 4gb of ram. it seems like startups are taking a lot longer and the color wheel is appearing all the time now even for simple tasks. it also says i have over 479 gb of space left and i really don't have that many programs? any body know how to speed it back up again?? thank you for replies.

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Go to System Preferences, Users and Group and click on login items and remove all the programs listed there. Also, download a free app called "Free Memory" from the app store and set it up to start at login. You can also use it manually, the app menu will be displayed on your tool bar at the top. Just click it and select free memory.

That's all I can think of at the moment.

Hope that help.

Also go to utilities, disk utility, select your disk and select repair disk permissions

erikfig said:

Go to System Preferences, Users and Group and click on login items and remove all the programs listed there. Also, download a free app called "Free Memory" from the app store and set it up to start at login. You can also use it manually, the app menu will be displayed on your tool bar at the top. Just click it and select free memory.

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Um… don't do that. Don't do ANY of that.

It'd help to know what you have loading up on startup. You can get that from the Login items in System Preferences/Users and Groups. Also, have you updated OS X completely? You should be on Lion since you bought new in October. I will tell you that, while Lion runs acceptably well on 4 GB RAM, I've found that doubling that will be more comfortable.

Can you open Activity Monitor and list the data under System Memory at the bottom? I'd like to know the Active, Inactive, and Used memory, and the size of the swap file.

Also take special note of my signature below.

hislip33 said:

hi i just bought a brand new macbook pro in october, it has a 500 gb hard drive and 4gb of ram. it seems like startups are taking a lot longer and the color wheel is appearing all the time now even for simple tasks.

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Sounds to me like the hard drive is failing. Disk Utility may shed some light on that. In the meantime, be sure your backups are up to do.

I had that problem once upon a time and then used the Onyx app to correct the problem. I have not had any problems since and this was about 4 months ago. But mine was not a hard ware problem. I find it hard to believe that you would have a hard drive problem on a 5 month old machine but I suppose it's not unheard of.

Onyx is a very stable program that fixes a lot of things that I certainly am not qualified to repair. As chad_m says having a good backup is most important.