Macbook getting slower...

When I first got my macbook it was so fast and about 2 months later im noticing some pretty bad slow downs. Websites take about 10 more seconds to load, closing a safari window could sometimes take as much as a minute longer to close and im starting to see that spinning rainbow of death for a lot longer periods of time. Ive only used about 6 gigs of my HD, so whats going on?

If you are using Firefox browser, slowdown can happen due to large amount of extensions/plugins.

With regard to Safari, only thing I can think of is the accumulated cache over a long period of time. Try to remove all your cache(Safari>Empty Cache). If that doesn't help, you can reset the browser to its original setting.

Have you added a lot of dashboard widgets? They seem to suck an awful lot of RAM, and if you've got the stock 512 you might notice a speed improvement by removing them.

However, the only reason I can usually think of everything slowing down like this is due to a runaway process. Check Activity Monitor and see if there's something gone wappy and using up all the CPU time.

10 seconds seems ridiculously long. Most web designers aim for <1second. Have you checked your connection settings, modem and router? What speed are you on?

Also, it's not the spinning rainbow of death! Repeated kernel panics maybe signify something nasty, but the spinning wheel is usually just over-stretched RAM, and most often caused by an unusually hungry or over-active application.

Make sure you do actually quit applications you're not using, and don't just close the windows.

thanks for the advice. I do have a lot of widgets, so that may be the cause.