Slow Mac

[BRB1]

I have a desktop Mac operating on Snow Leopard. Despite lots of "cleaning up" - removing old files, running Disk Warrior, repairing permissions, etc. it still runs slow. I get the spinning ball a lot and my browsers (Safari or Firefox) are often non responsive. Right now I find myself using my laptop which is much faster. Will using MacKeeper help or should I just take it into the Apple Store and have them try to fix this? Any suggestions?

 

[Kaveman]

You might like to check your Console Logs, if something is a miss it's probably crying into there.

 

[BRB1]

I'm feeling stupid - what is a Console Log and where do I find it?

 

[Kaveman]

Sorry, I thought from all your other efforts you had that handled. It's where I always start.

Applications Folder > Utilities Folder > Console app.

The main Log is the Console Messages, you can dig deeper from there.

The other place to look is Activity Monitor, if you Sort by CPU you can easily see if something is eating up the CPU cycles. I've seen the an HP printer driver completely consume 1 of the cores, needless to say that computer was "running slow" all the time.

 

[Bronzel]

Sorry, I thought from all your other efforts you had that handled. It's where I always start.

Applications Folder > Utilities Folder > Console app.

The main Log is the Console Messages, you can dig deeper from there.

The other place to look is Activity Monitor, if you Sort by CPU you can easily see if something is eating up the CPU cycles. I've seen the an HP printer driver completely consume 1 of the cores, needless to say that computer was "running slow" all the time.

Thanks, Kaveman, it seems way clearer now!
YouTube to mp3 converter

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

I have a desktop Mac operating on Snow Leopard. Despite lots of "cleaning up" - removing old files, running Disk Warrior, repairing permissions, etc. it still runs slow. I get the spinning ball a lot and my browsers (Safari or Firefox) are often non responsive. Right now I find myself using my laptop which is much faster. Will using MacKeeper help or should I just take it into the Apple Store and have them try to fix this? Any suggestions?

What is your Mac's Internal HD size & how much free space does it have? I know when the free space on my iMacs HD gets whittled down, it seriously affects the overall performance ...

I too have quite a bit of trouble with Safari, similar to your issues ... the worst was not being able to post at another forum I'm a member of ... really frustrating stuff that was next to impossible to diagnose because it was only happening at that particular forum.

I use a 3rd Party app called "WhatSize" to find out which files (hidden/not-hidden) are taking up space on your HD and recently found an 8GB iDVD project sitting on my Desktop ... INVISIBLE! Was happy to reclaim that space ... at the above link, you'll see there is a free trial link .... that's were you download WhatSize. The free trial is good enough to sort through your HD ... I think* in Free Trial mode, WhatSize can't measure anything over 20GB (I'm not sure of this) ...

I take it your Mac is a recent purchase? By recent I mean in the last 2 or 3 yrs?