NotebookForums.com › Forums › Notebook Manufacturers › Apple Forums › Apple Notebooks › What makes a mac run slow after a few months?
New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:

What makes a mac run slow after a few months?

post #1 of 7
11/9/05 at 8:04pm
Thread Starter 
I am an experienced Windows user, but I have no experience at all with macs and today a friend of mine told me that her powerbook was running much slower than it used to...I have tried executing all the daily/monthly/weekly scripts, but it does not help. She upgraded to 1Gb RAM about two months ago and that apparently helped at first, but now it is slower again. She also can't remember for sure if an upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 may have made it run slower or not.
Is there anything that can be done to make it run more quickly?
Alos, how much virtual memory would one normally expect to be in use on a Mac? I saw that the kernel takes over 100mb actual RAM and a few hundred Mb virtual RAM. Some other processes were using several hundred mb of virtual memory.
From my Windows experience, that seems rather a lot, but I don't know if that is normal for Mac users.
Finally, approximately how many background processes would you expect there to be running normally and how much memory would they take up?
Thank you.
Reply
Reply
post #2 of 7
11/10/05 at 2:50am
Not sure why it would run slow? How long has she had the PB? How did you run the scripts? Have you tried MacJanitor? Maybe try to do a memory test, not sure if this would cause it to run slow. I have had my PB for almost 6 months and it still is running strong.
Reply
Reply
post #3 of 7
11/10/05 at 4:55am
Like any OS it's not good to upgrade to a new version as opposed to a fresh install. If she did an upgrade from Panther to Tiger it's possible that has slowed it down.

Also, if she's upgraded to the latest version of Tiger through Software Update there might have been a problem with the patch as it doesn't replace any files not changed from the last version. Go to the Apple website and download the 10.4.3 "combo" update and apply that. It'll replace everything changed from 10.4.0 to 10.4.3.

Virtual memory is dynamically changed...but generally you should have a gig of swap space at any given time.

Approximately 50-60 processes should be running on OS X after start up.

Also, use Activity Monitor to see if anything is taking up a lot of CPU time.

You said you rain the maintenance scripts; have you repaired permissions?
Reply
Reply
post #4 of 7
11/10/05 at 7:37am
Thread Starter 
Thanks for the replies. I used Mac Janitor to to run the scripts. I repaired permissions as well. She has had the power book for about a year, but has only noticed it running slow very recently. By slow, I mean it takes quite a few seconds to load programs like Safari and, apparently, it used to happen almost immediately.
I will tell her to try the combo update later.
Reply
Reply
post #5 of 7
11/10/05 at 11:04am
Check "About this Mac" or System Profiler and make sure OSX is aware that you have 1GB. There are reports that one of the memory slots is constantly giving problems on some PB (the lower slot apparently, Apple Discussions forum).
Reply
Reply
post #6 of 7
11/14/05 at 4:23am
Quote:
Originally Posted by tentonine
Alos, how much virtual memory would one normally expect to be in use on a Mac? I saw that the kernel takes over 100mb actual RAM and a few hundred Mb virtual RAM. Some other processes were using several hundred mb of virtual memory.
Ignore the numbers in the virtual memory part of process manager. The numbers you see are how much memory the process may want at any one time, but often it's never actually using nearly that much memory. There is a long technical explaination on why this is done, but it basicially comes down to this. When virtual memory is being hammered for some reason like a large program is opening, you don't want to add to the slowdown by allocating more virtual memory to each process that needs it during that busy time. So because these programs reserve a potentially large chunk of virtual memory space, but don't use it, they save time later if they do need it by simply writing to it, instead of having to request it first. Also, disk space taken by virtual memory is not as high as it seems based on those numbers. The disk space will only be taken if the virtual memory space actually gets used.

As an example, I see one process on my mac claiming 75 megs of virtual memory space. One out of about one hundred or so. Peeking at /var/vm (the folder where virtual memory is on the disk), I only have a single swap file of 64mb in size.
Reply
Reply
post #7 of 7
11/14/05 at 8:10am
Thread Starter 
Thanks for the explanation.
Reply
Reply
New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:
  Return Home
  Back to Forum: Apple Notebooks
NotebookForums.com › Forums › Notebook Manufacturers › Apple Forums › Apple Notebooks › What makes a mac run slow after a few months?