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margotb822 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-24-08 05:34 PM
Original message
Macbook running slow
I have a MacBook and it has been running slow lately. And ideas on how to get it back up to speed? I know with PCs you can run the defragmenter, but is there something like that for Macs? I am pretty new to macs, so I apologize if I'm clueless...
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Elwood P Dowd Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-24-08 06:32 PM
Response to Original message
1. 52 ways to speed up your Mac
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moggie Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-25-08 08:31 AM
Response to Reply #1
2. I'm afraid I pretty much stopped reading that list after the first item
His number one tip for speeding up your Mac is "repair disk permissions". Aargh, no! This will have no effect on the system's speed. Sadly, repairing disk permissions has become a kind of snake oil in the OS X world, regularly trotted out as a panacea. When someone advocates it as a possible fix for performance problems, you should take everything they say with a large pinch of salt!
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moggie Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-25-08 08:51 AM
Response to Original message
3. Defragging is rarely needed
The HFS+ filesystem typically used with Macs doesn't suffer too much from fragmentation problems. Apple has an article here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

Is your disk almost full? And how much memory do you have?

If your Mac is running slow, you can ask it to tell you what it's doing. In the 'Utilities' folder under 'Applications' is 'Activity Monitor', which will display what processes are running, how much CPU they are taking, and various other information. This can help you spot rogue processes which are taking up an unexpected amount of CPU. Typically, when you're not running any other applications, Activity Monitor itself will show up as the top process, and the system will be at least 97% idle. I had a problem a while ago where my iMac would periodically get sluggish, and Activity Monitor showed that it was caused by SSHKeychain (a third-party utility I use) occasionally going bananas and using a lot of processor (fixed in a later version). If you do find a process which looks very busy, you may not recognise it, but it gives you something to google for.

Some dashboard widgets can consume CPU even when not on the desktop, so if you've installed any new widgets lately, that's one thing to consider.
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ChairmanAgnostic Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Feb-26-08 04:07 PM
Response to Original message
4. clearing out caches works wonders.
I do that daily.
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alfredo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-28-08 10:02 PM
Response to Original message
5. Macs do maintenance late at night. Laptops are usually off then.
Open your terminal in Utilities and type:


sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

hit return. It will prompt for your password. Type it in and let it do its magic. It will look like it is doing nothing for a long time. Don't worry. When it is done the prompt will return.

Let us know if it works.
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Elwood P Dowd Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-28-08 11:02 PM
Response to Reply #5
6. You could also download the free Mac Janitor and do the same thing.
Many Mac newbies are not comfortable with terminal.
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alfredo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-28-08 11:09 PM
Response to Reply #6
7. It doesn't run on Leopard, but great for older versions of OSX. I used to
use it all the time.
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Elwood P Dowd Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Feb-29-08 08:28 PM
Response to Reply #7
8. I forgot all about that. I'm still running Tiger so it just didn't dawn on me
the poster might have Leopard. I had some strange problem a few months ago and fixed it with Apple Jack. Can't remember the details, but after running AJ it was fixed. Back in the OS 8 and OS 9 days I often used DiskWarrior along with TechTool to keep things running smooth. With Panther and now Tiger, I've never bothered with those two.
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alfredo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Feb-29-08 10:55 PM
Response to Reply #8
9. Anyway, the command is simple and once you type it in, you can scroll
back by hitting the up arrow, find the command and run the scripts without typing.
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Pierre.Suave Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-02-08 05:09 PM
Response to Original message
10. Here is a link to an...
Automator action that runs OSX's built in maintenance utilities.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/maintenance.html

It comes with a version for Leopard and Tiger, choose which you need, click it and let it run.
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ChairmanAgnostic Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Mar-04-08 11:05 AM
Response to Original message
11. Cache Out is a shareware program I use
even on leapard.

and at least once a week, use your disk utility to repair permissions.
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