How to 'service' my Mac

[upside]

Hey ho all you experts out there,

Appreciate any assistance here,

I am using Macbook 2.0 GHz for about a year and a half, about last 4 months I change the OS to Leopard.

I found that recently my mac is getting slower and heavier, sometimes it hang/stuck/etc (the beachball came out ) and i need to restart as i cant force quit, this usually happen when i am using safari.

few things that i had noticed is the keypad for adjusting brightness and volume (F1,F2 and F3 -F4) can no longer perform their functions. I had to open from display and volume toolbar to adjust

How should I overcome this?

thanks

mr upside (now on a downside)

 

[Walrus666]

Do you use any maintenance apps?

 

[upside]

I am using servicescrubber, monolingual and maintiget as recommended by Mac|Life magazine. Thank walrus666

 

[Walrus666]

Sounds like we have to clean some of those caches out among other things. You might want to give these a shot. MainMenu and Onyx You might want to pay a visit to the developers site to see what these apps do and how to use them. Both of these apps are very good and what makes them even better is that they're free.

 

[upside]

Thanks for the tips Walrus666! Will give it a try.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

I found that recently my mac is getting slower and heavier, sometimes it hang/stuck/etc (the beachball came out ) and i need to restart as i cant force quit, this usually happen when i am using safari.

Were you aware that if you need to force quit an app there are a couple of different methods:

• Press Option + Command + Esc

This brings up the "Force Quit Applications" window, where you can select any open app and force it to quit.​

• Launch Activity Monitor

You'll find this in the Utilities folder which is in the Applications folder. A keyboard shortcut to open the Utilities folder from Finder, is:
Shift + Command + U​

When the Activity Monitor launches, you can select the hanging app from the list of Processes and click on the "Quit Process" icon found in the upper left of the window.