Help....MacBook Black Becoming Sluggish

[nextiger]

I have an original MacBook Black with 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo and 1GB of ram. The computer is coming up on 5 years old, I believe. The computer has ran flawlessly like the day I took it out of the box, until recently. My Mac has started to become a little sluggish doing normal activities and web browsing. I will click on things and it will take a couple seconds to "think" before working. I also get the spinning wheel of death several times a day. It will spin for 10-15 seconds and then kick into action. Im just worried that my computer is starting to die on me. I only use the computer for normal web, email, word processing, etc so Im not really sure why it is now starting to slow down.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated on what I can do to get my computer back into tip top shape. Thanks

PS...I have recently cleared all cookies and cache and history from my firefox browser. I have also backed up my entire machine in fear it will die soon.

 

[osxx]

How big is the drive and how much free space do you have ?
What OS are you running ?
I would definitely consider bumping the ram 1GB just ain't enough for current apps and the fact your built in GPU shares that ram.

 

[MacDude121]

Sudden slowdown can be caused by a dying hard drive, or an over-filled one. Check disk utility and look at the S.M.A.R.T Status, it should say "verified".

Also, as osxx said you really should consider upgrading the Ram, even with simple web browsing 1GB is not a lot these days, it can only help.

 

[nextiger]

How big is the drive and how much free space do you have ?
What OS are you running ?
I would definitely consider bumping the ram 1GB just ain't enough for current apps and the fact your built in GPU shares that ram.

I am running OS X 10.6.8

I know I should probably increase my ram and probably will. I have thought about doing it since the day I bought it. I never did it because the computer was performing more than good enough for what I used it for. Sure sometimes it would get slow if I was watching YouTube vids or had multiple programs running but for normal stuff it was fine. I guess I don't understand why now all of a sudden the low ram would be slowing down my computer, unless programs and stuff are now using more memory than they have in the past. I agree though that it can't hurt to upgrade.

Sudden slowdown can be caused by a dying hard drive, or an over-filled one. Check disk utility and look at the S.M.A.R.T Status, it should say "verified".

I checked the disk utility and it does indeed say "verified."

My hard drive is 120GB and it currently has roughly 40GB free space. It was nearly full, with only 7GB free space but I moved a bunch of movies over to my external a few days ago in hopes of speeding up the computer. Unfortunately, that didn't really make things much better.

Hopefully my hard drive isn't dying. Not sure how much a new one costs. Im sure cheaper than a new Mac.

 

[osxx]

You could pull up Activity Monitor and look at your page in/out to see that the ram is not enough.
Also you could if you have not yet download and run OnyX which is free and works quit well.
I would definitely bump the ram if you are going to keep it and you should notice a speed increase and yes Safari,iTunes,Quiktime etc,etc they all seem to need a little more ram these days.

 

[MacDude121]

40GB of free space is fairly decent, try going into "Activity Monitor" and when the slowdowns occur, check and see how much CPU and ram is being used, and by what applications.

Edit: osxx kinda beat me to it.

 

[nextiger]

currently the system monitor says...

Page Ins: 2.33 GB

Page Outs: 1.73 GB

Also it says I have 233.5 MB memory free

I guess Ill order some new ram and see if that helps. Any advice on what brand/type of ram to purchase?

 

[MacDude121]

Apple MacBook Memory DDR2 667MHz up to 6.0GB and up to 750GB Internal Hard Drive upgrades too

I believe that's correct for your model.

 

[nextiger]

On another note. Im amazed how much cheaper ram is compared to when I bought this computer. I remember it was over $100 to upgrade to 2GB now its like $30.

Also, I know that my computer will accept up to 3GB ram but Apple recommends you to run both sticks the same so you could only go up to 2GB. Does this matter? Should I max out with 3GB or stick with 2GB like Apple wants.

 

[nextiger]

Apple MacBook Memory DDR2 667MHz up to 6.0GB and up to 750GB Internal Hard Drive upgrades too

I believe that's correct for your model.

Interesting it says you can go up to 6GB with my model Mac.

This website says only 3GB and I remember seeing that number elsewhere also.

Finding RAM for the Black MacBook « BlackMacBook.com

 

[osxx]

Interesting it says you can go up to 6GB with my model Mac.

This website says only 3GB and I remember seeing that number elsewhere also.

Finding RAM for the Black MacBook « BlackMacBook.com

Using Mactracker max is 3GB while Apple states 2GB.

 

[MacDude121]

On another note. Im amazed how much cheaper ram is compared to when I bought this computer. I remember it was over $100 to upgrade to 2GB now its like $30.

Also, I know that my computer will accept up to 3GB ram but Apple recommends you to run both sticks the same so you could only go up to 2GB. Does this matter? Should I max out with 3GB or stick with 2GB like Apple wants.

I remember reading about this, they tested running 2, 1GB ram sticks in dual channel mode, and then running 2+1 GB sticks. As it turns out the extra gig of ram is actually more beneficial than running 2 identical sticks.

 

[osxx]

I think it was app dependent if it was interleaved it was a 6 to 8% improvement with matched ram but if not more ram always faired better.

 

[mostro]

Definitely do a RAM upgrade, I'd go for for 3 GB personally, as the little teeny benefit of matched sticks is only going to show up in benchmark tests. RAM is so cheap and having more than enough is priceless.

As for your sluggish system, even Macs become sluggish after years of use. I highly recommend just doing a fresh reinstall of the system from scratch (full disk reformat). Since you already have it all backed up it should be fairly easy.

I do recommend reinstalling software manually, settings, etc all manual instead of pulling a restore from your backup. Then just pull your actual files / documents from your backup instead of all your programs and settings as well, because that will bring all all the cruft with it too from years of updating software, etc.

 

[nextiger]

I just wanted to update this thread. I ended up purchasing some new ram on the advice on everyone here. I actually ended up going with 4GB instead of 3GB. One of the sites I was looking at advised to go with 4GB so that the sticks are paired up and then it will use 1.5GB of each stick. So when I look at the system profiler it says I have 4GB but when I open Activity Monitor, the computer is only utilizing 3GB of the 4.

I am actually amazed at the HUGE difference upgrading the ram has made. I wasn't expecting it to be this drastic, or I would have done this a long time ago. My computer feels brand new and is faster than it ever has been. Programs open soooo much faster and never delay. I can run more programs than I would ever need to simultaneously. I can have multiple youtube videos playing simultaneously and they play without a hitch. It really is awesome. Im actually thinking the 3GB might have been a little overkill for my needs but it was so cheap, there was no reason not to max it out.

Now in the future, all I have to do is upgrade my hard drive to a ssd (maybe) and get a new battery since mine doesn't last very long anymore.

I fully expect this computer to serve me well for several more years.

Thanks for the help!

 

[mostro]

Great to hear!

I believe on those models (I used to have a black Macbook, would LOVE to see an aluminum unibody black option) the video RAM was shared with system RAM. So if you were paging out a ton of RAM due to only having 1 GB and playing flash videos, etc, it might have even been paging out video RAM would make really kill video playing.

SSD would make it really fast. That's my next upgrade.