Why is my macbook pro running so slow and losing internet connection?

Question

Why is my Macbook Pro downloading so slowly and losing internet connection frequently?

Answer 1

Write off the MS stuff as indicators for now--starting with Office 2008, they developed very long launch times. The time to launch 2008 on my old 1.25Ghz G4 and my MBP 2.2G are virtually the same. Even document opens/saves are slow compared to Office 2004 and earlier.
1) You have adequate hard drive space so that eliminates one of the usual suspects.
2) Check for runaway background processes. Quit all running user applications so the computer is at normal idle. Find Activity Monitor in Applications > Utilities and launch it. If you've not run it before, change the "Show" pulldown at the top of the AM window from its default of "User Processes" to "All Processes." There is a column for "%CPU." Click that column header to sort by CPU usage. Watch the processes "bubble" for about a minute to get a better picture of the usage.
If any process is using more than about 25 percent of the CPU cycles while the computer is idling, post the names of the processes and we can see if they can be eliminated. My MBP shows nothing using more that about 5 percent on any given test run as long as I close all my user apps.
3) If you have never done any sort of maintenance procedures, taht can slow you down. Simply restarting the computer a few times a week clear a lot of temporary files. You also may wish to review this article on the Mac OSX periodic maintenance scripts, which, if run, also do a lot of cleanup:
http://thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html
There are other useful articles on file maintenance associated with the one. Here's the index:
http://thexlab.com/faqs/faqs.html
Check out articles with "Maintain" and "Tuning" in the titles.
4) Use Disk Utility to check the SMART Status of your hard drive. A failing drive can make things slow before it makes things stop.