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iCapture · Dec 26, 2007, 10:19 PM

A basic enough question no?

I bought my MBP about a year and a half ago. And Ive been becoming more and more annoyed by the fact that it doesnt run nearly as fast as it did when i first purchased it. That damn beachball pisses me off soooo much.

So why is it that with time computers slow down so much? It seems when you first open a computer its the fastest thing on the planet, but it ages...why? I know the more "stuff" you have on your computer the more it needs to work, but i have an external hard drive where i keep most of my files at anyway.

I know this question is elementary, but i think more people other than myself might be wondering about it.

Cold Warrior · Dec 26, 2007, 10:23 PM

It depends on a number of things. RAM, free HD space, corrupted system/OS files, viruses, malware, and the CPU needs of your applications.

If you tell us more about your setup, we might be able to help you resolve some of the sluggishness. I have a MBP purchased about 14 months ago, and it still works great.

besson3c · Dec 27, 2007, 12:10 AM

There is *not* a relationship between the stuff you have on your hard drive and system performance, but with the stuff that you have *running* and the resources being consumed by these processes/applications.

Check out your Activity Monitor application the next time your system is running slowly and let us know what processes are taking up the greatest percentage of CPU, perhaps we can help?

Just FYI, Activity Monitor is a GUI application for the Unix utility "top", just in case you have ever stumbled across something that has referenced top, for whatever reason.

Big Mac · Dec 27, 2007, 12:17 AM

Computers get older and slower and eventually they die and go to heaven. Computer heaven.

besson3c · Dec 27, 2007, 12:20 AM

Yeah, and sometimes emergency life support isn't enough to postpone the inevitable dying of a motherboard.. Sometimes you just have to pull the plug so that the computer does not have to live in agony and suffering.

In closing, here is a picture of George Cloony from ER:

Peter753 · Dec 27, 2007, 12:35 AM

My computer got slow when it got that AIDS virus

imitchellg5 · Dec 27, 2007, 01:57 PM

Originally Posted by Big Mac

Computers get older and slower and eventually they die and go to heaven. Computer heaven.

Yeah, but a 18 month old MBP shouldn't do that. I still use my 5 year old (almost 6) PowerBook G4 everyday.

Or maybe it's the Intel inside...

Simon · Dec 27, 2007, 03:23 PM

Originally Posted by imitchellg5

Or maybe it's the Intel inside...

That's it! Intel has patented the DieSlowly® technology which gradually reduces CPU performance up to the point where today's Intel can't compete with a G3 anymore. It's been great in increasing their sales numbers. If only we had gotten the PowerBook G5. At 150F it would have smoked any Intel around and all those to come for the next decade. PPC forever!

imitchellg5 · Dec 27, 2007, 03:30 PM

Originally Posted by Simon

That's it! Intel has patented the DieSlowly® technology which gradually reduces CPU performance up to the point where today's Intel can't compete with a G3 anymore. It's been great in increasing their sales numbers. If only we had gotten the PowerBook G5. At 150F it would have smoked any Intel around and all those to come for the next decade. PPC forever!

Don't worry! Macworld's just around the corner, they could always intro the PowerBook G5!

Chuckit · Dec 27, 2007, 04:13 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

There is *not* a relationship between the stuff you have on your hard drive and system performance

That's not necessarily true. A system with low RAM will run much worse if it also has low disk space.

seanc · Dec 27, 2007, 04:52 PM

The other possibility is that the hard drive is deteriorating, but I wouldn't expect that on an 18 month old MBP.
Like others have said, most likely due to a full HD, low amount of RAM, an app. using a lot of RAM or CPU.

imitchellg5 · Dec 27, 2007, 05:03 PM

It sounds in the original post like he doesn't have a very full HD. I would likely say RAM. Also maybe he's not closing applications and letting them run in the background instead of completely quitting?

SierraDragon · Dec 27, 2007, 07:03 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

There is *not* a relationship between the stuff you have on your hard drive and system performance, but with the stuff that you have *running* and the resources being consumed by these processes/applications.

Not true. Hard drives slow down as they fill beyond 50% or so. Not to exceed 70% full is a good rule of thumb. Even though drives will often function 95+% full, above 85% full slowdown is usually quite apparent and instability, even crashes, can result.

-Allen Wicks

mduell · Dec 27, 2007, 07:06 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

There is *not* a relationship between the stuff you have on your hard drive and system performance

Go take a look at a capacity vs bandwidth graph for a hard drive. And consider that it's harder to store files contiguously when the disk is nearly full, causing more seeks.

Waragainstsleep · Dec 27, 2007, 07:48 PM

Hmm. Nobody is looking at what has actually changed.
Here is hopefully a more thorough breakdown:

Insufficient RAM will cause a machine to run slower, but even if he hasn't added more, that shouldn't be the issue here.
When RAM is insufficient (and to an extent even when it isn't) the machine will use a part of the hard drive as a pagefile to deal with the extra space required.

The hard drive can cause slowdown if the data on it becomes fragmented, or if there is not enough free space to use as the pagefile. Since the pagefile uses free space, it too can become fragmented, causing further slowdown.
Since the MBP in question has little on its HD, this seems unlikely to be the cause either. As far as I am aware, Macs do a certain amount of behind the scenes work to defrag their hard drives, so this sort of slowdown should be largely eliminated be restarts or disk utility at the worst. Diskwarrior might also help with any errors in the disks catalogues, directories and indices.

A failing HD can also run slow. If yours is beachballing badly, this can be a bad omen (check if you have seagate drive, some of them have issues in the Intel notebooks).

As for the rest of the hardware, any slowdown from wear and tear in the CPU or system busses should be accompanied by an increase in temperature. I won't go into the physics. Look it up or take my word for it.
Which brings us to software. Corrupt preferences, permissions, cache files or other system and application resources can also slow life down, but the one thing no-one seems to have mentioned is software updates.
I too have noticed a slowdown even in some of the newer, faster hardware. The first MBP could boot in as little as 17 seconds out of its box. Whenever I do clean installs now however, I always update them all the way. Nothing comes close to that 17 seconds. Have you seen the size of some of the software updates? Especially for Intel macs. Huge compared to PPC. Leopard is 5.9GB without printer drivers or extra languages. Tiger was 1.9GB when similarly stripped down.......

As I say check your HD if you are getting silly beachballing times and backup. If you really want to check for slowdown, Wipe your drive, reinstall from the shipped discs, then test without running software updates. See if its any quicker than it is now.

PER3 · Dec 30, 2007, 02:25 PM

How does it run if you create a new account and log in there from a new start?

If it's better, try deleting (that is, moving them somewhere else) all of your preference files—apart from those for Mail.app, as it's a pain to reset. Log out and log in.

Does that help? It did for me.

stevesnj · Dec 31, 2007, 10:21 PM

wayne_i · Jan 1, 2008, 01:14 AM

Regardless of operating system, our desire for more features and better graphical interfaces has led to software that is far from compact. This is one of the reasons why not all Universal software is faster than the older Gx based power pc software on an intel machine. So, in the course of 18 months, you have likely upgraded software which has put greater demand on RAM and CPU/GPU processing cycles. RAM you can usually increase, but the processors are pretty much fixed.
You may be able to get a little more speed out of some applications by going to a faster hard drive. Not easy to do in the MBP, it is still an option if you have one of the smaller 4200 or 5400 rpm drives. moving to either a 7200 or one of the large 320G 5400 drives should speed up application loading, cache speed, and read/write speeds.

Wayne