Backing up/Cleaning

Any advice on backing up my MacBook Pro 10.4.11, and what is involved in cleaning it for faster speeds? Next step will be how to download video capability. Thank you...

Probably the easiest way would be to upgrade Tiger to at least Leopard since that's the first version of OS X to include Time Machine. But if you can't or don't want to do that, look for an old copy of either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper and use it to backup or clone to an external drive.

As for cleaning, again you'll need to look for an old copy of a cleaning and maintenance program. The one we recommend is OnyX.

The original 1.83GHz releasesof MBP ran Tiger OS X.4 as the system installed, and these are now coming up to eight years old. Sadly not too much you can do to speed things up. Also the 2GB memory limit does not help.

I'm thinking of making it as clean as I can, update after backup, and searching for some kind of smaller unit, like an I-pad or Tablet of some kind. Portability vs. lugging a heavy Macbook around w/ a battery that doesn't hold. I replaced it once. $100+ was enough. If the plug-in disconnects, it goes black within minutes.