# SLOW MacBook...very slow



## dannyrabbittang (Nov 2, 2006)

Hi guys,

So last night I restarted my MacBook after having worked spent hours in Word and Excel, cause the system's RAM distribution was getting hogged by Word/Excel. After I restarted the MacBook, I noticed that it was SLOW, at first I thought it was normal, thinking it was just because my start up apps were loading. However, after a while I realized it was just plain SLOW.

Does anyone have an idea what's wrong? And remedy for this? I mean I got spinning beach balls for every other word I typed here....


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## MACSPECTRUM (Oct 31, 2002)

download and run OnyX to clear all your caches

you can find OnyX via google


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## dannyrabbittang (Nov 2, 2006)

MACSPECTRUM said:


> download and run OnyX to clear all your caches
> 
> you can find OnyX via google


Thanks for the reply MACSPECTRUM, I tried clearing the cache's, was much/if any improvement.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Check your Activity Monitor for GoogleUpdater activity - it was driving my Quad G5 off the chart - 100% CPU usage on one processor.


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## dannyrabbittang (Nov 2, 2006)

MacDoc said:


> Check your Activity Monitor for GoogleUpdater activity - it was driving my Quad G5 off the chart - 100% CPU usage on one processor.


I don't have GoogleUpdater installed on my MacBook.


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## Cobalt` (Sep 29, 2007)

dannyrabbittang said:


> I don't have GoogleUpdater installed on my MacBook.


did you check your activity monitor yet?


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## dannyrabbittang (Nov 2, 2006)

Cobalt` said:


> did you check your activity monitor yet?


yup, pretty normal to me, less than 10% load.

I'm starting to think my HDD is about to fail, would that be a plausible reason?


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## Cobalt` (Sep 29, 2007)

dannyrabbittang said:


> yup, pretty normal to me, less than 10% load.
> 
> I'm starting to think my HDD is about to fail, would that be a plausible reason?


do you hear sounds (spinning sounds, loud.. things you didn't hear before)? is it slow to move files in your hard drive? how much ram do you have? ---


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## dannyrabbittang (Nov 2, 2006)

Cobalt` said:


> do you hear sounds (spinning sounds, loud.. things you didn't hear before)? is it slow to move files in your hard drive? how much ram do you have? ---


Well I don't hear anything abnormal right now, but a few months ago I thought I heard some clicking but wasn't sure if it was clicking or not, but things seemed smooth after that. When I put my hear against my MacBook to where the HDD is I can hear regular spinning. Moving files on and off of the HDD is extremely slow, and I have 2GB of RAM.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Yes very plausible - do you have an external?


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## dannyrabbittang (Nov 2, 2006)

MacDoc said:


> Yes very plausible - do you have an external?


I'm just about to copy my backup image onto my external.


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## dannyrabbittang (Nov 2, 2006)

dannyrabbittang said:


> I'm just about to copy my backup image onto my external.


Okay, so spontaneously, everything's back in working order, full speed, no 'lag'... does this indicate it was a HDD problem? or was it just RAM hanging up all over the place?


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## Orion (Apr 16, 2004)

It could be that, for some reason, the Spotlight Index was reset and the machine was re-indexing your drive. Extremely disk intensive and will slow down the fastest machine. I'm only guessing, but it's all I can think of at the moment.


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