Blind leading the blind

[SpringHeeledJack]

I was helping a buddy who is even less IT minded than myself to cure his slow laptop. MacBook Pro 2008, new style running Mavericks. He complained that it took a bit longer to access his mails through the mail program than normal. On examination ALL the apps seem to be 'sluggish' and I thought that his RAM might be too low. 4GB capacity, but only 2GB installed. I did some housekeeping and that didn't have any appreciable effect. Loads of capacity on the hard drive. He was using ML before and that was slow too…..:confused: I then did the option/ctrl/shift and on button thing for 10secs and then the laptop came on, all ok, except…….same as before. Any suggestions apart from a visit to the genius bar ?


SHJ

[mixture]

What happens if you boot up in safe mode ? (power off, power on holding shift)
Has he got any Login Items ? (Prefs -> Users & Groups)
Has he got a whole ton of crap on his desktop ? (I'm talking hundreds of files here, not a dozen... if so, try creating a folder and dumping it all in there)
Have you tried zapping the PRAM and resetting the SMC ? (suspect you might have done the latter with your talk of option/ctrl/shift).
Have you done an AHT (hardware test.... not sure if its built-in on older macs, disk might be needed....try holding D during startup)
Have you tried repairing permissions in Disk Utility ?
What sort of hard drive is in there ? In particular what RPM ? (Apple->About This Mac -> More Info -> System Report)
What sort of processor is in there ? (as above)
Anything interesting happening in Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor ? (CPU, swap usage etc.)
Anything interesting in Applications -> Utilities -> Console ?
Are you sure it isn't just Spotlight re-indexing ? (click on magnifying glass in the menu bar, there will be an "indexing" message if it is)

If you're feeling techy and fancy digging deeper, hit Control-Option-Command-Shift-Period and take a look at the resulting zip that it will output in /var/tmp after a couple of minutes (normally the finder will pop-up that folder in a window for you when done), that key chord will give you :


o A spindump of the system
o Several seconds of fs_usage ouput
o Several seconds of top output
o Data about kernel zones
o Status of loaded kernel extensions
o Resident memory usage of user processes
o All system logs, kernel logs, opendirectory log, windowserver log, and log of power management events
o A System Profiler report
o All spin and crash reports
o Disk usage information
o I/O Kit registry information
o Network status
o If a specific process is supplied as an argument: list of malloc-allocated buffers in the process's heap is collected
o If a specific process is supplied as an argument: data about unreferenced malloc buffers in the process's memory is collected
o If a specific process is supplied as an argument: data about the virtual memory regions allocated in the process


More RAM never did anyone any harm, although OS X is quite light on RAM on its own, so I suspect the underlying problem is elsewhere (although swap usage etc. will tell you about RAM usage).

My money's on it probably being a 5400rpm hard drive in there (some of the entry-level 2007/2008 era models had those). If so and he's adamant he wants to keep the 2008 going a bit longer, then perhaps try swapping for a SSD drive. Before I upgraded to a newer model, I had a 2008 model, and a decent SSD did help..... not as fast as SSD + new model with more modern processor .... but it did help prolong its life a little longer nonetheless.

Enough to keep you busy SpringHeeledJack ? :E

P.S. Useful OS X performance diagnosis cheat-sheet here (http://brendangregg.com/USEmethod/use-macosx.html) (and top-10 Dtrace Scripts for OS X here (http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/10/10/top-10-dtrace-scripts-for-mac-os-x/)) both from the senior performance architect at Netflix......before Netflix, Brendan was as Sun, and has also literarily written the book on systems performance..... as well as conducting the occasional somewhat unscientific test.....

tDacjrSCeq4

[vulcanised]

7dayshop.com are doing a lot of Apple gear at (near) half price.

Don't know if that includes RAM.

[SpringHeeledJack]

As always, much obliged mr mixture. I'll have another hack at it tomorrow and armed with your suggestions I'll be sure to impress with my knowledge. It's getting harder to find anyone that knows less than me in this facet of life ;)


SHJ

[Booglebox]

ML / 10.9 is a bit of a RAM hog. I have some machines that run it with 4gb and it is just enough for regular office stuff. 2gb is cutting it pretty fine.

["when I were a lad" interlude: I remember running 10.3 on iMac G3s with 128mb RAM and for a whole year my personal machine was a 1st gen white Macbook with 512mb RAM running 10.4]

[Mac bashing interlude: Mac OS performance on old hardware has gotten worse over the years. Windows 10, on the other hand, has essentially the same requirements as Vista which will be nearly 9 years old by the time it comes out]

SSD always helps :cool: