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Recently my Macbook i5 has been running extremely slowly.
Especially when running something like iPhoto or iMovie but can be anything, including just Safari.
It used to be really quick, I figured it was because the HD was almost full but I've emptied that and its still mega slow.
It's 4GB RAM. Guessing that is adequate?
Any ideas how I can work out what is going on?
Have a look in Activity Monitor and see if anything's eating CPU. Might be worth running a repair in Disk Utility.
Backup and reinstall if you can't figure it out but have a look first. If it's still labouring after a reinstall then you've got a hardware problem.
Have you got lots of stuff on the desktop? Quartz Compositor treats each icon as a separate window. If you have lots of icons on your desktop, your VRAM might be filling up (depends on what video card you are using).
Are you regularly running some kind of log file deletion? something like onyx, main menu or similar?
Applejack it.
More ram helps, 8 is better 16 better still.
Not that much on the desktop now, although there was.
I read about resetting VRAM. Is that a good idea?
Looking on activity monitor, there isn't much "free" RAM. Most of it is active or wired.
CPU usage is very low though.
Don't think that thing about the desktop is still true is it?
Defrag? Apple say you don't need to but it might be worth trying. There are various scripts you can run using a program called Onyx that can help too.
I googled resetting PRAM/NVRAM and that seems to have worked a treat!
No idea what exactly was causing it, but something I will remember for the future.
Funny I had a similar problem last week.
Go onto the Apple's App store and go into the Facilities Apps
There is a free app I use called Memory Clean read the reviews
But here is the link for the [url= http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/when-should-you-zap-the-pramnvram-on-your-mac.html ]PRAM/NRAM[/url]
Do you reboot on a regular basis? I was surprised to find out many Mac users just put their machines to sleep all the time.
Can't remember the last time that I turned mine off. Just close the lid when I'm not using it. Never had an issue.