MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
My Macbook is about 2 1/2 years old now and I feel sure it is going slower. If it was a Windows machine I would be thinking of a disc format + reinstall to perk it up a bit.
Does the same logic hold with OSX?
If I do, how good is the Timemachine re-load?
Thanks
It won't make quite the same difference as it would on windows but it will help. It might be worth getting a new Snow Leopard install DVD - it is definately quicker than Leopard.
I had to use my Time Machine backup when I silt lemsip on mine. Run the istall and it will ask if you have a backup disk. Just choose to restore the home folders rather than all your apps if you want. It's surprisingly straightforward.
Good luck
Rachel
I found my old mac running very slow. talked to loads of people at apple and they reckoned it was a profile problem. they sent me loads of patches etc, none that worked.
so what i did, was copy all my files etc to somewhere safe and then created a new user profile. this removed all the clutter, cookies and sync profile issues etc that all slow things down awfully. when youre happy it all works properly, you can (although you dont need to) delete the old profile.
ive now put snow leopard on and things are wizzing along quicker than ever. the other thing to ensure is that you have plenty of spare HD space, as Mac OS uses this as a cache whilst you are woking
Creating a new profile can help, I'd be tempted to do what AndyCh suggests.
10.6 is apparently a performance improvement. Reformatting isn't needed as much as on Windows but reloading from TM can improve defrag.
Interesting article from the makers of Cocktail app:
http://blog.maintain.se/2010/05/defragmenting-or-not-defragmenting-that-is-the-question.html
Have you run Activity Monitor to see if it's RAM/Virtual Memory/CPU?
I use maintenancewidget to run the maintenance scripts. Onyx or itool are a bit more indepth maintenance tools, both free.
Another decent widget is iStat pro for keeping an eye on what is happening under the hood.
I'd definitely recommend installing Snow Leopard - my Macbook was noticeably faster running it.
When i ran the activity monitor before doing the work, everything was maxed out!!
Already on Snow Leopard, did an update from Loepard
Activity monitor looks OK, low CPU usage, 50% free HD, lots of free RAM and a slightly odd VM report of 129GB considering my HD is only 120GB!
Might give the new profile thing a go, but that wont improve the boot time which I am also sure is longer than it used to be
applejack will do a lot to speed things up. it's free too.
Is applejack compatible with snow leopard?
yes. i used it a couple of weeks ago to sort out some wireless issues (it didn't work had to reset the p-ram which did)
i do it periodically and after software updates. there are always preffs that are wrong.