Macbook - Running S.L.O.W

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Hello guys, and thanks in advance for any help!

First of all I am on my Macbook, running Firefox on a computer that is one year and a few months old. While I love my Mac it is getting slower. Previously I would clean through old files movies and such and it would run better, but that does not seem to be helping this time. Currently I have 55.6 GB total, and 17.7 GB free....
1. Does this have anything to do with the speed of my computer and internet?
2. If not what does?
3. How can I make my computer run faster again?

Also, off subject but its bugged my for a while, and since I'm here... whenever I get a file and try to open it up, my computer opens it up in Safari. How do I change this? For example I have and .html link in a .doc file and it automatically opens in Safari. Anyway to make this not open in safari and open in firefox?

4. How do I make my computer open files in Firefox, not Safari.

Thank you all for reading, and any that help!!!!
Tsuke
 
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2019 iMac 27"; 2020 M1 MacBook Air; macOS up-to-date... always.
Hello guys, and thanks in advance for any help!

First of all I am on my Macbook, running Firefox on a computer that is one year and a few months old. While I love my Mac it is getting slower. Previously I would clean through old files movies and such and it would run better, but that does not seem to be helping this time. Currently I have 55.6 GB total, and 17.7 GB free....
1. Does this have anything to do with the speed of my computer and internet?

It shouldn't. That's still quite a fair bit of space free.

2. If not what does?


3. How can I make my computer run faster again?

Could be any number of things. I suggest picking up a utility that will do a variety of maintenance tasks for your OS. Onyx and MainMenu are both free and pretty much all-inclusive. Definitely run the "daily, weekly, and monthly" maintenance scripts. You could also clean out the cache, repair permissions, etc.

Also, off subject but its bugged my for a while, and since I'm here... whenever I get a file and try to open it up, my computer opens it up in Safari. How do I change this? For example I have and .html link in a .doc file and it automatically opens in Safari. Anyway to make this not open in safari and open in firefox?

4. How do I make my computer open files in Firefox, not Safari.

Sounds like you want Firefox to be your default web browser. You set that in the preferences of the web browser of your choice (Firefox, in your case). There's also a 3rd party utility called MisFox that can set this for you.
http://mac.clauss-net.de/misfox/
 
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iBook G4 1.33 Ghz. 512MB Leopard Airport Bluetooth
1. Does this have anything to do with the speed of my computer and internet?

I would say probably not. Since OSX shouldn't have to use that much space for the system to run properly. (Might check on a defrag though)

3. How can I make my computer run faster again?

I personally had to do a full format and reinstall after a archive and install was VERY SLOW. My system actually took over 30 mins to boot to finder before the format. After the reinstall; even though my ibook is bare minimum, it is running every thing like a champ.

Also if you don't want to do a full format, I would do like life said and check on maintenance/cleaning utilities and might check on any extra programs you may have that could be causing conflict (The reason I had to do the format.)

hope it helps

hyperstatik
 
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This question gets asked a lot and over time I have built up a collection of the most common "cures" - it works, I use it myself. Here it is:

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
 
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Thank all so much for the information! I will try some of this when I get a little more free time.
I'll write back if I have any more problems!
Thanks again guys, you were very helpful!

Rep+ as well ^^
 

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