[ClaraT]

Hello,

My Macbook is not moving too fast these days. Web pages are taking longer to load and some applications just don't whip open like they used to. My friend's newer notebook jumps to life real quick and her websites open right away.

What should I do? Delete some things like old email, documents, photos? Remove/uninstall old applications no longer used? Is there some basic cleaning/purging/maintenance that will help this macbook act like it
did when I first got it-runs much faster? I'm looking for a an easy fix here.

Perhaps I need more memory? If so, is that easy to do myself?

Macbook 2.4G Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 2 GB 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM

Activity monitor says 110 GB is active, inactive is 565 MB, Used is 1.99 GB and
10.30 is free.

Thanks for helping with the sluggishness.

ClaraT

[Big Mac]

How full is your hard drive? A newer, faster hard drive is one possible remedy. It's hard to tell from your activity monitor numbers if you need more RAM or not, but unless you use RAM intense apps or a lot of apps concurrently on your MacBook (which I doubt), 2 GB is likely sufficient.

[ibook_steve]

I would have to disagree with that. There's no such thing as a "sufficient" amount of memory to maximize performance. If you can afford it, you should *always* max out RAM. The system can always use more memory and that will always improve performance.

You don't mention what apps you run or if any app is using an excessive amount of your CPUs (organize by CPU % in Activity Monitor). You could also try a clean install of the OS, but that would requiring configuring settings again for all your apps.

Steve

[ClaraT]

Apps are Safari, Mail, Microsoft Office:Mac, and recently loaded, iWork, also use iPhoto, the usual stuff, no games, no big apps.

What's causing this machine to get draggy then? It's slow when it starts up in the morning, so it seems irrelevant how many apps I run at once, since it's lost it's
agility to open and close apps fast whether I have one open or four.

Here's the info on the HD that Big Mac asked about.

Macintosh HD:
Capacity: 148.73 GB
Available: 85.19 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk0s2
Mount Point: /

And thanks for taking the time to look into this with me.

ClaraT

[turtle777]

Any suspicious apps / processes in the Activity Monitor that hog your computer's CPU ?

-t

[ClaraT]

By "suspicious apps" do you mean things I don't use or don't recognize?

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by ClaraT 

By "suspicious apps" do you mean things I don't use or don't recognize?

Yes, or known apps / processes that "get stuck" and use up a lot of the CPU time.

-t