Macbook is slow…. on boot up

I have 4GB's of RAM but as my Mac is a mid 2009 model which I bought refurbished in early 2010 I think that may be the biggest issue. Howver I wonder if I popped in 6GB's of RAM if that would do any good. 4GB's was plenty to run Snow Leopard but ML seems to make it more sluggish, especially upon boot-up and after sleep. However I will add that during operation the Mac is fine. Looking at activity monitor I see that I have 731MB's of RAM free at this time and I usualy have the following apps open.

Outlook
Word
Safari
iTunes
iPhoto
Messages
Quicken
Reminders
Calendar
Contacts
Notes

So is the problem just the age of the mac and the CPU speed? My parents have a much more modern Mac with also 4GB's of RAM and it runs far faster. Perhaps the main issue is the CPU speed. But I do not understand why the Mac is mostly sluggish on boot-up, but seems to work fine during operation.
-----
I have a macbook Mid 2009 2.13ghz with 4GB's of RAM running Mountain Lion.

evangelist6589 said:

So is the problem just the age of the mac and the CPU speed? My parents have a much more modern Mac with also 4GB's of RAM and it runs far faster. Perhaps the main issue is the CPU speed. But I do not understand why the Mac is mostly sluggish on boot-up, but seems to work fine during operation.

Click to expand...

Could be a hard drive problem. What I would do first is run the maintenance program Onyx:

Titanium's Software • Index page

Run the automated tasks.

If the problems persist after running Onyx...it's possible you may have to replace the hard drive. Also tell us how full & how much free space your HD has.

- Nick

It's also possible that some of the system files are scattered from one end of the drive to the other - along with the free space being scattered from one end of the drive to the other. In this particular scenario - typically with drives that have been in use for awhile and that have now or have had less than 50% free space, a defrag can work wonders related to your boot time. I've had a full defrag reduce my boot times from just under a minute to 26-28 seconds on my '06 MBP.

I would run Onyx if you're not use to doing that once in awhile - then download the demo of iDefrag.

The demo won't do much, but you can take a look at the fragmentation of the drive. OS X does an exceptional job at keeping your files defragmented. It does that by using the entire drive. Which means that when you look at the results, you will find very little file fragmentation, but your free space could be very fragmented. Over time, files can end up all over the place.

iDefrag does a great job at restoring your boot speed and application launch times to like new. In the testing I've done, it does a better job and provided me with faster boot times than an erase and cloning back with SuperDuper! or an erase and reinstall using Time Machine. I did run iDefrag once on a brand new install of OS X (10.6.x) and it reduced the boot time by 6 seconds - approx 20% on that machine.

Installing an SSD after cloning your current drive will do more to speed up your boot times than any additional RAM. Crucial M4's can usually be found with special offers/rebates if you are persistent enough and they are among the most reliable SSD's on the market.

Also, keeping that many programs open in 4GB of RAM under ML is probably a bad idea. More RAM would definitely help.