Macbook upgrade advice

[Colossal Squid]

Alright chaps? Anyone good with Macs?

My 2009 MacBook is painfully slow and awkward, making it difficult to get anything done on it. Were I a wealthy man I'd simply replace it with a new one, but the sort of money involved makes that a no no.

I just wonder whether there are any performance fixes that I can carry out on the cheap to give this one a new lease of life. Specs wise it already has as much RAM as it can cope with (4GB) and obviously I can't replace the processor. So really all I can see is replacing the hard drive, possibly with a solid state drive. The current 320GB drive has plenty of space on it so it's not an issue of being too full.

For the technically inclined, it has a 2.26MHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 256MB NVIDIA graphics card, 320GB SATA HDD and is running the latest OSX version.

Given its specs, should I be expecting it to be painfully slow? Or could I realistically expect to get more form it were it better optimised?

My usage isn't particularly resource intensive. It is mostly web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, basic web authoring through Dreamweaver, occasional PDF authoring and some light Photoshop.

I have a big external drive which I use to backup stuff on so a full wipe and refresh isn't out of the question, if it would help. But I'm loathed to give it a go if it won't really make any noticeable difference.

Ultimately I don't want to have to replace this because my budget means I'd have to go back to a Windows machine. And that sucks. So does my Macbook have a future, or am I asking too much of a machine that's four years old?

 

[itszamora]

I'm surprised it's running so slow. My MacBook is a similar age and spec to yours, albeit one OS down and with a smaller hard drive. I also have an external drive attached, and whilst it doesn't run lightning-fast, it's certainly not painfully slow. So I would hope that it's possible to improve its performance.

 

[Arthur]

Get an SSD, they are relatively cheap now and the performance increase is unreal. I had a similar quandary a couple of years back and I bit the bullet and shelled out nearly £400 for an SSD. Best thing I ever did performance wise. Boot time went from about 45 seconds to < 10. Apps went from bouncing on the dock 4 or 5 times to starting instantly.

That same drive is about £120 now.

Admittedly I've got a MBP which is a bit beefier than your box but not by allot.

 

[El Sid]

I've run a Repair Disk Permissions on the wife's iMac a couple of times.
Seems to have helped. She has a lot of photos in iPhoto and uses Photoshop.
Are you sure you can't add more RAM?

 

[Springal]

I'm surprised it is running slow, I have a Macbook Pro from 2008 ish, and it flies along still ! Still on Leopard too, considering upgrading but wonder if I'll start pushing it too far.

 

[beorhthelm]

i dont know much about Mac's but i know this: computer hardware does not get slower over time (bar recoverable harddisk failures), and adding RAM does not speed up a computer. this is a software issue. in Windows land the typical solution is to defrag and uninstall all the crufty shite you've installed (sometimes unwittingly) over the years. As i understand it Mac OS being a grown up unix OS handles fragmentation far better but i assume its still a potential problem, so look into that.

an SSD will make boot and application load times very fast, but its an expensive upgrade if the root problem was just fragmentaion.

 

[Bozza]

It should still run fine which suggests there's something up with it.

Are there other things running that are gobbling CPU or memory - check in activity monitor when it seems to be slow.

Is it running hot - is the fan whizzing away at high speed?

 

[Marxo]

4GB ram should be enough but when you use several programs even when you close them your ram gets a bit fragmented. Have a look at the activity monitor (in utilities) and you can see the green 'available' ram gets smaller and smaller as the day goes on. An occasional restart usually helps. Also as sidtheseagull pointed out Repair Disk Permissions is also worth a go.

 

[Colossal Squid]

Cheers for the advice.

Sounds like I'm not asking too much to expect a bit more from it then.

I wonder whether upgrading to Mountain Lion was a mistake. And would I be better off back on Lion, or even Snow Leopard?

I have heard a lot of good things about the huge performance boosts gained from SSD drives. And given I store my movies and media on an external drive I don't think I'd need a particularly big SSD.

As for the RAM, the machine suggests this is maxed out with 2 x 2GB modules HOWEVER it would appear from a bit of searching, that it is possible to stick 4GB into each of the slots, even though it isn't officially supported.

@Arthur, what was the SSD you bought? Are there any things to look out for with them? Or are they all fairly interchangeable?

@sidtheseagull, what is this Repair Disk Permissions you speak of?

 

[Bozza]

Also trying an SMC reset would be worth a go. (Google it - it's straight forward enough)

 

[El Sid]

Have a look at this

http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57595312-285/repair-disk-permissions-to-speed-up-your-mac/

 

[Colossal Squid]

It should still run fine which suggests there's something up with it.

Are there other things running that are gobbling CPU or memory - check in activity monitor when it seems to be slow.

Is it running hot - is the fan whizzing away at high speed?

Activity Monitor currently reports the CPU is about 70% idle. Predictably the biggest resource hogs are my two browsers (I use both Chrome and Firefox, for work) and Flash, which actually, I wouldn't miss. Think I might go and deactivate that.

It isn't particularly hot and it makes no noise whatsoever.

The problem isn't just it running slow, it seems to hang on a semi regular basis and often times programs crash and go wrong. The biggest culprit seems to be Outlook which systematically crashes every time I try and move any mail items. The trouble is I find the in built OSX Mail client isn't advanced enough and although I'm no big Outlook fan, it does seem to be the most accomplished Mail client that runs in OSX.

Were I to get a decent SSD and possibly roll back to Snow Leopard, might this be the most prudent move? Or am I overlooking issues as things stand that I should be able to sort without having to open her up?

 

[Arthur]

@Arthur, what was the SSD you bought? Are there any things to look out for with them? Or are they all fairly interchangeable?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Ser...id=1375180230&sr=8-2&keywords=samsung+830+ssd

Samsung had got some pretty decent reviews at the time so I went with them but as long as it's 2.5in I'm sure they are much of a much. Read and write speeds are what you want to look out for. Have a read of the some of the tech sites for reviews.

Installing is a piece of cake. Just remember to take the securing plate off the old drive and put it on the new one else it'll rattle about.

Oh and repair disk permission is found in disk utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility OR About this Mac > More Info > Storage)

 

[Bozza]

I can't believe Mountain Lion is the issue based on your symptoms.

If you are close to an Apple Store and can be without it for a day or two you can book a Genius Bar appointment and take it in. It doesn't have to be under warranty and they'll not charge you unless there's something that needs doing.

The concern would be that the logic board has a fault. If so it probably wouldn't be economic to repair unfortunately.

 

[beorhthelm]

...The biggest culprit seems to be Outlook which systematically crashes every time I try and move any mail items. ... Or am I overlooking issues

seems the first place to start is to remove/reinstall Outlook. if problems occured after upgrading the OS, then rolling back seems the second thing to do. spending money on faster hardware to dodge troubleshoooting is probably the last thing to do. Going with an SSD will mean a reinstall, which will itself probably clear the problem. though getting a SSD is a great thing to do for its own reasons.

i dont know how most peoples Macs run, but if i had 30% usage at rest on any machine (windows or unix) i'd be looking for the culprit thats nicking 20-25% CPU and probably not behaving, causing other problems. at rest with you not running anything in the background like videos or opening anything, just watching the system monitor i'd expect a few % CPU in use.

 

[Colossal Squid]

Ruddy heck, the Disk Utility seems to be taking its sweet time and has already found several hundred issues. Certainly seems to have been a good place to start.

I hadn't thought of taking it to the Apple shop. Frustratingly it is only recently that the extended Apple Care warranty expired too.

I had thought of reinstalling Outlook but I don't always have it running and the machine has issues even when I'm not using it. It seems to struggle more than most, but it's certainly not alone in regularly falling over. Adobe Acrobat and Google Chrome are also prone to going buggerup.

I'm running the Repair Permissions now and will be interested to see if that makes any difference. Would I be wise to do a reboot once its done its repairing?

 

[brightn'ove]

That shouldn't be running slow at all, go for a full wipe and if that doesn't help, there might be something wrong (overheating etc) so take it to a specialist.

I have the 2009 iMac which has pretty much the same specs as that and it runs like a beauty.

 

[Colossal Squid]

I have the 2009 iMac which has pretty much the same specs as that and it runs like a beauty.

Reassuring. It seems several folk with similar machines are getting far better performance than I am, which makes me think that some further investigations may be required instead of me giving up on it and eBaying it.

Since running the Repair Disk Permissions utility it is now idling at around 80% CPU usage, which is an improvement. But I still want MORE

 

[Bozza]

Reassuring. It seems several folk with similar machines are getting far better performance than I am, which makes me think that some further investigations may be required instead of me giving up on it and eBaying it.

Since running the Repair Disk Permissions utility it is now idling at around 80% CPU usage, which is an improvement. But I still want MORE

I wouldn't get hung up on that too much - that's plenty free and 20% usage would not cause any performance degradation at all.

Looking in Activity Monitor was more to see if something was using up 80%+ by itself without you being aware.

 

[Colossal Squid]

Oh ok. Well since I killed Flash there's nothing that's eating into resources massively.

I think I'm going to book it into the store to see if they can identify anything specific before I go down the route of a new OSX install. But assuming there is no crippling hardware issue I'm definitely going to get me a nice SSD.

There's life in the old girl yet!