Help with MacBook please

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My macbook has been acting up lately, it keeps giving me lots of beachballs when I am using doing anything, using such as itunes, or web browsers (safari, firefox, google chrome) microsoft office programs, etc. Even starting up takes longer, I can't even properly shut down sometimes because it freezes. I have looked on many forums trying to clean it up and do anything I can before taking it someone.

I cleared all my browser caches, repaired my disk permissions, verified my disk (turned out ok), checked activity monitor to see how my RAM is and this is what I see with activity monitor (See attachments).

So I clearly need some more space or at least start making some space. But my real question is, what do I need to do about my page outs? why is that and how do I fix it?

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chscag

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Welcome to the Mac Forums.

Since this is your first post - please observe:

You posted in our Community Suggestions and Feedback forum which is as it states is for suggestions and feedback. Your post was moved here to the Mac Notebooks forum where it belongs. Also, your title was changed to better identify your post.

Thanks.
 

pigoo3

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But my real question is, what do I need to do about my page outs? why is that and how do I fix it?

I can barely read the text in your pics...but if I saw things correctly...you only have 1gig of ram. You need more ram to help reduce the propagation of page outs.

- Nick
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
Tell us about your MB. Model? Operating System? Memory etc etc etc?
 

pigoo3

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But my real question is, what do I need to do about my page outs? why is that and how do I fix it?

I got a better look at your pics from a different computer...and it looks like you have 2 gig of ram (so that's better than 1gig).:)

Like Harry asked...please tell us what exact model MacBook you have. Then we can look up what the max. ram is for that model.

Also. Page-outs can be controlled very very easily...just reboot the computer. When you reboot the computer...page-outs go to zero. But the less ram you have...the faster the page-outs value will grow to a point that the computer is slowed down (beachballs).

And with only 2gig of ram...having too many apps open at once will also cause problems.

Thus...with only 2 gigs of ram & lots of apps open...page outs will grow quickly...and you need to reboot more often to control the page outs.

- Nick
 
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Sorry, forgot those key things I have a standard MacBook
with OS 10.5.8 yes I know a little old
has a 2.4 ghz intel core 2 duo with 2 Gb of memory
model no A1181
Model ID MacBook 4,1

About the applications, It begins to slow severely with only one app open, so I don't think it is that.

like I said before, I know I need to get a back-up hardrive to give me some more space, but I was just curious if there is anything else I need to do in addition
 

chscag

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Boot your MacBook with your original Leopard DVD # 1 and run Disk Utility from the top menu Utilities. Verify the hard drive and let us know the results. I suspect your hard drive may be on its way out.
 

pigoo3

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wont that erase my hardrive?

No. Telling Disk Utility to erase your hard drive would erase your hard drive. "Verifying" the hard drive is not erasing it.

- Nick
 

bobtomay

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15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
Definitely need to verify and run Repair if it returns any issue. If the drive proves not to have any issues...

If you don't have a backup, I would strongly encourage you to backup that drive before doing much else to be on the safe side.

Either the drive is beginning to go south or:

Biggest problem I see is 19 GB free on a 150 GB drive. That's <13% free space - just not enough and on a machine that old, what free space there is will be scattered from one end of the drive to the other along with the apps and data it's trying to retrieve. Have seen a lot of folks say you can run an OS on 12GB to 10% free space, but I've never sat at a computer running a HDD with less than 20-25% free space that I didn't get up from frustrated. At less than 15% and never been defragged, every time it needs to write anything to the drive, it's having to hunt for contiguous blocks - then not finding any and writing data to multiple areas on the drive.

The 2 GB of RAM is probably contributing to it, but not nearly as much as the full drive.

And your page outs in that screen shot is sitting at zero - don't know how you can get any better than that. Another sign - at this point - it's not due to lack of available RAM.
 

dtravis7


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Agree with Bobtomay. That drive is quite full. That and with only 2GB RAM both might be causing your issue but for sure do what was suggested and run Disk Utility. Check the SMART status at the bottom and verify the drive.

Report back with your findings. It could very well be the drive is dying.
 
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I installed OSX disk, and ran disk utility and the drive is fine. Repaired permissions while I was in there. So I guess the only problem is that my hard drive is full. I'm planning on going and buying a large external drive soon anyway because I need to backup my wife's computer too.
Thanks for all the help, I'll let you know if it is still running slow after I backup my hard drive.
 
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duplicate OS

So it's been a minute since we discussed this last.
I had run the original mac osx disc and installed the system and created an archive of the system i was running.

Since then I also took off about 80 gb of files and dumped them on another computer temporarily.

The problem I am having now is that I have 2 os on the computer and would like to restore to the previous system I was running since there was nothing wrong with it and nothing wrong with my drive. How do I restore the previous system?
 

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