Old MacBook Pro slow and hangs frequently, hard drive problems?

Question

Hi,
I have an old Macbook Pro (one of the originals, from about 4 1/2 years ago). Recently I've been noticing that it runs really slow, especially when its been running for a while and there are multiple programs open. It will take a long time to switch between windows, opening a tab in Safari will usually cause a spinning beach ball for 10-15 seconds and Safari crashes frequently. Other programs have similar problems, but don't normally crash. It's running Snow Leopard and has 1GB of RAM. Obviously I expect it to be slower with lots of stuff open, but my usage patterns haven't changed and its performance certainly has. The harddrive always seems to be being accessed when I have these problems.
The hard drive S.M.A.R.T. status is "verified," and I ran the Apple Hardware Test and it came out fine. But I'm still really worried that something could be going wrong, especially with the hard drive and since I am going away in a few weeks to work on a project and will be away from my backup drive I really want to make sure any problem is taken care of beforehand.
Does anyone have any ideas as to what could be the the problem or about anything I should try?
Much Thanks.

Answer 1

With lots of concurrent processes and insufficient memory you will experience slow performance and beachballing. This is because the OS is forced to use the hard drive to replace the non-existent physical RAM. See the following:
About OS X Memory Management and Usage
Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
Memory Management in Mac OS X
Performance Guidelines- Memory Management in Mac OS X
A detailed look at memory usage in OS X
Understanding top output in the Terminal
The amount of available RAM for applications is the sum of Free RAM and Inactive RAM. This will change as applications are opened and closed or change from active to inactive status. The Swap figure represents an estimate of the total amount of swap space required for VM if used, but does not necessarily indicate the actual size of the existing swap file. If you are really in need of more RAM that would be indicated by how frequently the system uses VM. If you open the Terminal and run the top command at the prompt you will find information reported on Pageins () and Pageouts (). Pageouts () is the important figure. If the value in the parentheses is 0 (zero) then OS X is not making instantaneous use of VM which means you have adequate physical RAM for the system with the applications you have loaded. If the figure in parentheses is running positive and your hard drive is constantly being used (thrashing) then you need more physical RAM.
Also, a small hard drive with too little free space and a system lacking in any regular maintenance can also lead to slow performance. See the following:
Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.1 or higher are Intel Mac compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. Versions 1.5.1 or later are Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts had been significantly reduced in Tiger and Leopard. These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard and should not be installed.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc. Other utilities are also available such as Onyx, Leopard Cache Cleaner, CockTail, and Xupport, for example.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard. AppleJack 1.6 is compatible with Snow Leopard.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
Backuplist
Carbon Copy Cloner
Data Backup
Deja Vu
iBackup
JaBack
Silver Keeper
MimMac
Retrospect
Super Flexible File Synchronizer
ynchronizer
SuperDuper!
Synchronize Pro! X
SyncTwoFolders
Synk Pro
Synk Standard
Tri-Backup
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at CNet Downloads or MacUpdate.
This should give you a few things to start sorting things out and getting better performance from your computer within its limitations.
If you have a Core Duo model then 2 GBs is the maximum RAM you can install. If you have a Core 2 Duo model then you can install up to 4 GBs but they system will only make use of 3 GBs. As for the hard drive it can be replaced. Notebook drives in the 250 to 500 GB - 7200 RPM range are relatively inexpensive. Visit OWC for pricing on drives and RAM. Visit Data Mem for pricing on RAM.