Mac Getting Slow

I've been noticing my Macbook has been getting really slow. When I got it, it usually booted up in about 15 seconds and applications opened in a snap. Now it take about a minute for my Macbook to start up and when I try opening Firefox, which used to open in an instant before, it takes forever! Is there something wrong with my Macbook, or does this normally happen over time?

have you tried cleaning your system and application caches?

if not, try one of these free apps:

onyx - excellent maintenance tool, great for cache maintenance and tweaking preferences.

mainmenu - alternative to onyx, not quite as fully featured, but easier to use, and a bit less dangerous.


you may notice that the first restart after you do this may take longer than normal. once you get past that, everything should be pretty peppy.

Another thing that would slow it down is the number of items that you have up in your menu bar, too.
OS X tries to start them all at once, instead of sequentially.
I removed everything from start at login and then wrote an Applescript to start them sequentially and made it my sole item at login. That helped.

40 secs

mine takes 40 seconds to start up iv only had it four days is that normal ? it was refurbished but from mac cheers in advance

griffo70 said:

mine takes 40 seconds to start up iv only had it four days is that normal ? it was refurbished but from mac cheers in advance

Click to expand...

Which MacBook?

Here is my usual "recipe" for tuning up a slowing Mac:

First, check that your processor is running full speed. Go to Preferences, Energy Saver, Options and look at the drop box down near the bottom called Processor Performance. If it is not set to "Highest", set it to that right away. This maximizes performance, but for notebooks, it may run down the battery faster. Note that not all Macs have this setting - laptops do, and my certainly my PowerMac G5 tower does, but not all Macs do.

Next, download OnyX and run the complete set of clean up and maintenance scripts and then evaluate again. Get OnyX at:

http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

Next, you may wish to check that you have enough free space on your hard drive. Highlight the Macintosh HD icon on your desktop, CTL-click it and select Get Info from the resulting menu. Make sure you have a reasonable amount of space left. If not, a little spring cleaning may be in order.

There are two excellent apps for showing where all of your hard disk space has gone, Disk Inventory X and WhatSize. Get them at:

Disk Inventory X: http://www.derlien.com

WhatSize: http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize

Both do a great job at letting you zero in on your largest disk space consumers, so that you can hunt down any rogue files (and both are freeware, which is good).

Finally, it is possible you may have some processes running that are consuming a lot of idle CPU, thus slowing down your machine overall. I had a bad widget that did this once. Open Activity Monitor and look at your "resting" CPU occupancy when you are not doing anything in particular with the machine. It should be pretty much zero (maybe 1% to 2% at most). If it not, identify the process or processes that are taking the time. What are they? Do you recognize them? Are they needed?

If you find one that is not needed, kill it and see how your machine starts to behave. If this is the cure, you will need to identify the startup item that launches it and delete it.

So, in summary then, take the following steps in order:
1/ Start with ensuring that your processor speed setting is full (applies to many Macs but not all)
2/ Then do Onyx based full maintenance
3/ Then check that you have sufficient available disk space
4/ Finally, search for processes that are consuming an unexpected amount of CPU

For cleaning/maintenance (like onyx) I find ultimateTask to be a very good application as well. http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20529

You can set what you want it to do (cron scripts, cache cleans, etc etc) and then just click one button to run it all, and you can also set an auto restart or shutdown after the processes have been completed, if you wish.