Macbook running very slow

My Macbook is running really slow or sometimes it won't even open any applications. Is this common? I installed Onyx to run a clean up and sometimes it just freezes when opening Onyx. Does anyone have any advice on this issue? Any advice will be helpful.

NeoGreen said:

My Macbook is running really slow or sometimes it won't even open any applications. Is this common? I installed Onyx to run a clean up and sometimes it just freezes when opening Onyx. Does anyone have any advice on this issue? Any advice will be helpful.

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Have you shut down any apps you aren't using? (an arrow next to the Dock icon shows which apps are still running)

Run the activity monitor in the utilities folder to see what is eating up your CPU.

Amen-Moses

Okay, I'll try that thanks.:mac:

Try restarting as well... This sometimes helps my mac occasionaly becomes slower if it hasnt been restarted for a while
Cleaning up unused hard drive space is effective to
Hope this helps

Also, by default the clean-up process for OS X runs at some time in the early morning, i.e around 3 am or so. At least once a week allow your machine to clean-up by leaving it on (not asleep!) overnight.

This clean-up will delete temporary file no longer in use and tidy up the file system (sorta like a defrag but not quite) to make it faster.

You can put the screen to sleep when you do this but just leave the Hard Drive and CPU settings to be on overnight.

Amen-Moses

I have a Macbook can I leave it on? Also you said "not asleep", what exactly is not asleep. I have left my Macbook on for an hour without touching it and the screen goes black, but a small white light on the left corner of the laptop stays on. Where can I go to find out when this clean up takes place? Thanks for the help guys, I wouldn't know what to do without your help.:mac:

Here's something easier and you can run the maintenance tasks at your convenience instead of leaving your MB on all night.

Download MainMenu and run the maintenance tasks manually.

There are daily, weekly and monthly scripts. What I do is simple: first thing in the morning when I startup my iMac, I launch MainMenu and execute the daily task. I have chosen Saturday to run the weekly task plus the daily task. Once a month you run the daily and monthly script.

In case you do need to know how to keep your MB awake, simply go to the System Preferences ---> Energy Saver ---> Sleep tab.

In there you can set the display to go to sleep but the top slider is for the computer itself: you simply put the slider to never.

Also you said "not asleep", what exactly is not asleep

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Your mac book is sleeping when the white light slowly flash's to tell you its still on, it generally does this is left for a while or if the lid is closed

If you go the "Mainmenu" route to perform the Daily/Weekly/Monthly tasks (which I recommend) you can then set recurring reminders in iCal to tell you when to run the Weekly/Monthly tasks and for the daily I think MacHeadCase's way works well.

am i the only mac user who doenst use ical?

I have the same macbook you do minus the c2d. I find that if I have safari or azureus running for too long my ram meter on my istat nano can be really high. I think this is a memory leak that is fixed by restarting the program, but im not sure. One time when I closed safari like 400mb of ram was freed up. Well, try that?

Great thread.

am i the only mac user who doenst use ical?

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Nope im in the same boat as you lol
Havnt found a use for it

Also, note that if you get "dashboard happy" and have lots of widgets out there, they are all running in the background taking up memory and CPU time even when you are not actively looking at your dashboard. Get rid of widgets that you are not using (even all of them if you do not really use dashboard). Dashboard is neat, but you can get overzealous and add all sorts of widgets that you think you might use but really never do and slow your system down a LOT.

Wow, thanks for all the tips.

Thank you!

Thanks for the great thread. I downloaded and ran MainMenu and I am back to my normal speed.