[neverskatewsandles]

Over the last few months I've noticed my macbook has slowed down significantly. When I say slow I mean its extremely slow. I can hardly use the thing on the internet and apps seem to take forever to load if I have more than one open. Knowing I have only 1 gig of ram I realize that an upgrade will be the only real help but I know when I got the macbook it never ran slow. Is there anything I can do (for free) to clean out my macbook and bring it back to normal speed?

[macaddict0001]

How full is the harddrive? I would suspect a harddrive problem. 1 Gigabyte of RAM is also pretty low, but should be adequate for Snow Leopard if you aren't too demanding. What version of Mac OS are you running? Did the slowness coincide with any software updates? More information would help.

[SierraDragon]

• I concur, first step is to remove enough data to keep the hard drive no more than 70% full. After resolving that then look for other issues. Note that overfilled hard drives will slow down operation and can lead to serious instability.

• Newer app and OS versions are utilizing more and more RAM (after all, RAM is now cheap). Browsers can be surprising RAM hogs, some versions worse than others. IMO most laptop users will benefit from max RAM.

• Hopefully you have not loaded any free or pirated software, because such apps frequently come with malware embedded.

Good luck!

-Allen