7 year old Macbook Pro

is deeply loved but getting slow & have to force quit programs. Any ideas appreciated,

How full is the hard drive (gigs used & gigs free)?

- Nick

I just installed one of these in my 2007 vintage MBP

Amazon.com: Crucial M500 480GB SATA 2.5-inch Internal SSD 7mm drive, with 9.5mm Adapter CT480M500SSD1: Computers & Accessories

hi Nick, 39 GB free of 320, is this enough ..... flaunting my ignorance

Tizerboy said:

hi Nick, 39 GB free of 320, is this enough ..... flaunting my ignorance

Click to expand...

We generally recommend that folks maintain at least 20% free space on their hard drives (this helps the computer operate more efficiently).

If you have 39gig free out of 320gig…that makes the hard drive about 88% full (about 12% free). It's possible freeing up some hard drive space will help speed things up.

Also…downloading, installing, and running the free maintenance app "Onyx" may help:

Titanium's Software • Index page

- Nick

But the truth of the matter is probably that you need a new(er) machine. You don't say what OS you're running on that machine but it is, at this point, very unlikely to be updated and is thus no longer secure/vulnerable to issues (particularly from Flash and Java). Seven years is a well above average, time to treat yourself to something newer.

thanks for the advice, will try out Onyx but sense a shopping trip coming up....

Tizerboy said:

thanks for the advice, will try out Onyx but sense a shopping trip coming up....

Click to expand...

Running Onyx is a good thing. But your main problem may be the 88% full hard drive.

- Nick

hi Nick, downloaded Onyx, get the following when try to run ' your security preferences allow installation of only app from mac store & identified developers '......advice welcome, thanks Steve

PS, OSX is 10.9.4 ta

Tizerboy said:

hi Nick, downloaded Onyx, get the following when try to run ' your security preferences allow installation of only app from mac store & identified developers '......advice welcome, thanks Steve

Click to expand...

Go to where Onyx is located. Right click and then Open it. You'll get a message from Gatekeeper saying essentially the same thing, but gives you the opportunity to go ahead and run it. After that, you won't need to do that again, it will just run. Gatekeeper is Apple's way of making sure that only things you want to run, or that come from trusted developers through the Apple store, actually run.

- Nick

I didn't see any mention of how much memory is installed in that MBPro, and I gather that Mavericks is installed which still wants and needs lots of RAM.

I still have and sometimes still use my mid-late 2007 MBPro and it still runs fine. But the OP's HDD may be starting to fail if it's still the original. But there's a possible fix for that as well.

Hard drive is also going over the amount of free space required. Suggested is 15-25% free or, as you are experiencing, things get bogged down. The fuller the drive the slower it gets. If you intend keeping it, remove what you can and run iDefrag over it.

thanks everyone, am getting better perfomance now