My computer has slowed down, my computer has slowed down,any ideas on how to speed it up

Question

My MAC has slowed down,any ideas on how to speed it up?

Answer 1

How much free disk space do you have?
You may want to run these "standard" fixes if the problem persists.
1) Check the amount of free space on your harddrive.  You should have a several gigs free.
2) You should run disk utility
     a) verify the disk
     b) update your permissions.
3) Try a safe boot.
    Shutdown your machine.  Hold down the shift key.  Poweron.  Wait awhile Wait awhile while you harddrive
      is being checked.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1455
4) You may want to run applejack to clean up your machine.
     http://applejack.sourceforge.net/
a lot more ways to fix your Mac.
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/faqs.html
Look at what is happening with your Mac when you run Activity Monitor.
Macintosh-HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor
1) Be sure you select all processes in the double arrow selection just be low the window title line.
2) Click on the CPU tab on the lower half of the window to see how much time you are using and if any applications are hogging the CPU.
3) Be sure the triangle in the CPU title is in the down position.  This will list the processes from high to low.
You can gain some understanding of Activity Monitor by  looking at it every once in a while.  Look at the small graph.
Here is how I have my CPU display set up:
Do you need more cpu memory.
Click on System Memory to get statistics on memory usage.  You should have some free memory.
The number to look at is page outs.
Mine is 13397. This means that some of my programs and data had to be written to disk because cpu memory filled up for a time.  It means my programs ran a little slower than they could have.  I could run fewer programs, deal with the slowness, or buy more memory. I'd say you want at least 512meg of memory for 10.4.
If the entry for entry for Page ins/outs is:
Page ins/outs: 29163/0
Notice I have 0 pageouts which says that I am not using my harddrive for extra memory space.  Thus, I have enough memory.
Activity Monitor has a neat feature where it can display a dynamic dock icon.  In Activity Monitor View > Dock icon > Show cpu history.
"Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor :"
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918
Managing Memory
See   Kappy
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8025223#8025223
Problems from insufficient RAM and free hard disk space
http://thexlab.com/faqs/lackofram.html