I AM SO SICK OF THIS !!! HELP PLZ

Question

my computer was workign fine. everything rolling ok until I ran an update for OSX and Outlook 11.
If I type something it takes a good 10 seconds to realize what i did. all these errors you see now (typos) is bc of this lag I am talking about.
If i open a new tab in firefox it takes a good 15 seconds and so on.
NO it is not my RAM I have 4 GB of ram .
< Edited by Host >

Answer 1

After reading through your other posts (most in Snow Leopard 10.6 area) and issues
remain, you may have to consider making a complete backup of your user folder &
account info, and any saved or created content, from your computer to an external
device, drive, clone or other means of archiving off of the computer.
{Read through to the end, since not any one idea is the complete course of action.}
Then, when you have saved and verified as retrievable said contents, get your
stuff together and totally wipe the computer's hard disk drive, zero content, use
Disk Utility on booted Install DVD and choose a partition map, then reformat to
HFS+; and install a new system on a wiped clean hard disk drive. Update it.
Then migrate your previous user account into the Mac.
If the problem(s) in your computer which go back over months, are not resolved
by attacking their source or cause, they will be masked by other activity which may
not solve their root cause. Could be just a matter of corruption in a User account.
If the problem is in a user account, an Archive & Install (if space exists in HDD)
may bring in the problem to a new system.
Since the problem goes back to November 2010 in some form or another, this
job may include extensive review of what maintenance you perform regularly
to keep the computer running healthy; like: what you do, when, why, etc.
Perhaps it is time to actually restore full original function to the computer, and
hope the process will tell you if the hard disk drive or other component is failing.
A too full hard disk drive, or corruption of the content on the hard disk drive, can
cause slowness and other things to grind to a halt. You may need to boot from
the Installer disc and run Disk Utility from there, and have it Verify the HDD, and
if there is an issue, see if the utility can Repair the hard disk drive. If it can't, then
you may have to get a third-party disk utility such as DiskWarrior, on disc media.
If you have and use an externally enclosed hard disk drive unit with a chipset
controller within it to allow Mac OS X booting from that unit, then you can make
a full computer content clone (to a large external HDD) large enough to have
more than one partition so you can have more than one bootable clone on there
and also use it as a backup/storage for stuff on another partition in that drive.
You can get a great and free-running clone utility from Bombich software; it is
called Carbon Copy Cloner, a download. And get/use an externally enclosed
hard disk drive, one that is self-powered (not computer-bus powered) to do it.
Even starting the computer in SafeBoot mode, if it will, (shift key held down
on start up, wait while holding the key down, until a startup dialog box appears
to be sure you are really getting into SafeBoot; it may take 10 minutes) and
then when in SafeBoot, run Disk Utility's 'repair disk permissions' on the Mac HD
and when that's done, quit Disk Utility. Check the amount of used capacity of
the computer's hard disk drive against the total amount it had when new, and
note or write down the numbers. When done, restart the Mac normally.
You can also look into Activity Monitor (utility) to see what, if anything, is using
the computer's resources when the machine is running slower than expected,
and this can tell you what Apps and system bits are using Virtual Memory
(hard disk drive space used for swap files and temporary in/out memory) and
this is where free space available to the OS X is critical. This may be part of
the problem, if the hard disk drive is TOO full for the system & apps to work.
Hopefully this helps somewhat, and that someone else will have better ways
of writing shortcuts. I did not add outside links to this post, it is long enough...
Good luck & happy computing!
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