Snow Leopard in my Macbook Pro is slowing down

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I have a 2009 Macbook Pro, 2.2GHz with 8GB DDR3 memory. Lately it's been running really slow. Opening Mail could take 2-3 minutes to open, Firefox takes a minute to launch. Why is it doing this? Looking at my memory usage I still have 3 GB free memory. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MacBookPro 11,2 <--DAW!!!
Try "Repairing Permissions" on your internal system hard drive with the Disk Utility App in your Utilities folder.
Or
Try running Software Updates from Apple.
 
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Thank you Juke for your quick reply to my frustrating issues. I will do that today and let you know the outcome. By the way one more question, will the computer slow down to have a lot of files on the Desktop? I know this will affect Windows but I'm still a newbie to a Mac. Thank you.

Alan.
 
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Hi Juke,
Did what you said but it's still slow even though there were a lot of permissions that need repaired. I did it a few times but no good.

Alan.
 

RavingMac

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Your Mac's Specs
16Gb Mac Mini 2018, 15" MacBook Pro 2012 1 TB SSD
How much HD Free Space do you have? (You can check this by right clicking the HD icon and choosing Get Info)
Your Mac will begin to slow down as you drop below 15% free space and get seriously slow the farther below 10% it drops. You don't want to let it drop to nothing or you are asking for trouble.
 

chscag

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2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
What version of OS X are you running? It always helps us to help you if you give us complete info on your Mac when asking for help.

I'd like to advise you to run a verify on your hard drive but I have to know what version of OS X you have.

And yes, lots of icons on the desktop will slow things down especially upon startup. Also, it's a good idea to run a maintenance utility every once in awhile. We recommend the free OnyX which you can download from here. Do not run any other cleanup or maintenance utility as most are snake oil and do not work.
 
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Razormac I'm using a 500 GB WD hard drivewith 227 GB free space.
chscag my apologies I'm using a Snow Leopard OS X 10.6.8. My problem is not in loading the desktop though, it is in launching Mail and Firefox. After doing the disk permission repair the Firefox launched almost immediately but Mail is still very slow, maybe 1 minute to launch.
Thank you.

Alan.
 

chscag

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2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
Try the suggestion above (download and install the free OnyX program). Run it in automatic mode. It will also verify your hard drive and check SMART.
 
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Thanks chscag, I just downloaded it and running it now, so I need to change it to automatic mode and run it. I'm just a little scared to run anything in auto mode. I've got "Spring Cleaning" and when I run it in auto mode it deleted half of my files, I had to restored them back!

Alan.
 

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