MBP Performance Decline

[TheBiggmann]

Lately, my Macbook Pro has been running a lot slower, and I have no idea why. I've noticed a SERIOUS decline in performance than when I bought it, or even from 6-8 months ago. I'm running the 2.5 GHz Penryn MBP (generation before unibodies) with 2GB ram. Is there any type of maintenance I can/should be doing to speed it back up? I'm getting the beachball a lot if i try and do multiple things at one time, and its terribly slow running WoW, which it never used to be. I haven't changed anything that I can think of that would cause this, the only thing would MAYBE be that I put SL on it, but that was right after it came out, and I think it started running slow a bit after that, so I don't think thats it. Help?

 

[umrigar]

Onyx.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11582/onyx

 

[TheStu]

Up the RAM, that is a reasonably inexpensive boost, you also might have some sort of latent background process that is eating up resources. Check Activity Monitor in Utilities and see if anything in there could be the culprit.

 

[TheBiggmann]

But is there any reason as to why it's suddenly so much slower? This thing was blazing before, and now it takes so much longer...

I also just tried this Onyx program. It does a scan at the start and tells me my startup disk needs to be repaired. Is this common/legit?

 

[TheStu]

If you have a spare hard drive and an enclosure, you can boot off it and run Disk Utility to check the drive for errors.

 

[rdp6]

Definitely check for hard disk problems. I have the 2.33 GHz Merom (older than the Peryn) and I am certain that user interface - related computing tasks have gotten better / faster going from Tiger to Leopard and again from Leopard to SL. Other stuff, not so much except for advances in algorithms e.g. handbrake / h.264, etc.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

I think it's the drive. Beachballs usually are associated with hard drive reading. If I were you, I would reinstall Leopard or whatever OS you have on there and do a time machine restore.

 

[TheBiggmann]

So are you saying I should replace the drive or just back it up, wipe it, and restore it?

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Back it up, wipe it, restore it.