[jnbull]

I have a first generation 13.3 aluminum macbook (before they changed it to a macbook pro) that i ordered new a little over a year ago. It has been running perfectly until last week. On Monday of last week during the day it just all of a sudden started running incredibly slow. It takes me forever to open up any program or browser window. It takes forever to open a new tab in a browser as well. Sometimes just typing in word is extremely slow and painful.

I have no idea what happened to cause this problem. I took my computer into the mac store genius bar and frankly I was not impressed. The guy spent about 30 seconds to diagnose that it was "runnng slow." Then he created a new profile and told me things looked fine to him. I tried to explain to him that when you first boot up the computer things run fine for about 10 minutes and then they start churning along very slowly. He just said, well, see how it goes and if you need to, make another appointment and come back.

The problem is, I am on vacation right now so a MAC store is only about an hour away from me, but when I am at home the closest mac store is about 4 hours away. I don't want to keep making appointments and going to mac stores just for them to spend 30 seconds and send me out the door.

I know I have been pretty vague, but I don't really know how else to explain it other than things start going extremely slow.

I did not install any new applications or anything prior to this change in behavior. I have run a few "cleaning" tools and the apple care diagnostic tool from the apple website and everything comes up saying I have no problems.

Right now I am using my Windows machine and I really want to get back to using my mac, but I don't know what else to do.

If any of you have any suggestions I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you,
Nick

[ibook_steve]

Open up the Activity Monitor application in the Utilities folder and click on the "% CPU" column to see what is hogging your CPUs. Something is hogging them and you need to figure out what it is. An app may be frozen (highlighted in red) or some app may just be eating your CPU cycles. You can select a misbehaving app and click Quit Process to quit it. Chances are it is something you've installed (plug-in or some other background app that you did not realize you installed) that is causing the problem.

Steve

[EndlessMac]

While you are in Activity Monitor also look at your RAM usage and see if it is used up for some reason. If your RAM is full then your computer will have to use Virtual Memory which is a lot slower than RAM. It really is hard to figure your problem without much further information. Maybe someone else might have other ideals as what is causing your problem.