Older Mac Book Pro is slow and bogging down

My older Mac Book Pro is getting slow and having issues like a PC (programs freeze and closes, slow to respond, slow to open programs, wifi signal dropps out, etc)
Is there a way to restore the performance, maybe by doing a wipe and a time machine restore?
The hard drive is only 2/3 full and I don'e run a lot of high demand programs.

Sarmaticus wrote:
I seem to have read somewhere that the Mac does auto-defragging during late night admin sessions (on certain dates only) if your computer is left switched on overnight. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable would have a little more about this....
Ah, there you go. It's in the MacLife article mentioned by shoulder2thewheel: 3.15am nightly admin sessions. Just need to leave your Mac on.
Not good if you have loads of bad sectors though, as you may find that system files will be written over the bad sectors... and hey presto, you have a fatal disk crash, just like on my computer two nights ago.

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