How can I improve my MacBook's performance?

First off, if you’re feeling an overwhelming urge to lecture me about how horrible Apple products are and that I should just switch to a PC, please don’t bother. I’m well aware of both sides of the issue, and like politics and religion, it’s not a discussion I’m interested in having. Thanks.

Now then. I have a MacBook laptop. I think it was the last generation of MacBooks to be made - the kind with the white plastic case and a rubber piece that covers the entire bottom, not just rubber feet. The Model Identifier is 6,1, if that helps. It’s got 2 gigs of RAM and a 250 gig hard drive. It’s probably around 2 years old.

The performance has really gotten bad over the last few months. I’m talking getting the beach ball for 3-4 minutes when I try to switch to email, or not being able to watch YouTube videos because it takes so long to load and then pauses every few seconds during the playback.

I’m trying to figure out what upgrades will do the most for me and give me the most bang for the buck. I’ve been told it’s important to leave around 10% of your hard drive free, which I don’t do. I typically have between 7 and 20 gigs free.

So if you were a more knowledgeable version of me, what would you do? Bigger hard drive? More RAM? Something else? Bag it and get a new machine? My local place charges $35 to install either a hard drive or RAM.

More RAM is almost always good, but it’s hard to say whether that’s your limiting factor without looking at the Activity Monitor to see utilization. I would recommend running the Activity next time the computer hangs up, to see if you can tell what’s being max’ed out - processor, memory, disk, etc.

Some delays like you describe (though usually not that long) could be a result of faulty file permissions or even a failing hard drive. Have you used Disk Utility recently to repair/verify permissions and the disk structure?

It could be that the problem is a combination of factors - limited RAM means more access of the hard drive, which is fragmented or short of space for virtual memory because it’s so full.

Assuming, it’s compatible, I’d throw something like theSeagate Momentus XT in there. Not only will it free up your hard drive space, but the SSD cache will speed things up considerably.

And 2Gig of memory is pretty small nowadays, so upgrading to 4 or 8 Gig (assuming your machine can handle it) is pretty cheap and easy.

More RAM.

More RAM.

More RAM.

2GB is not enough for a modern system, running a modern web browser.

This.
4GB + Momentus XT 750GB drive.

It will feel like a new machine.

Replacing the hard drive and RAM in this machine is a piece of pie.
Just remove the battery, and three screws to get at both.

If you can find someone with a SATA-USB adapter, you can clone your existing HD right before you install the new one, and not have to re-install anything.

Find a local Macintosh user’s group, and ask for help…

Put in more than 4GB if you can. This page suggests it will take 8GB.

If that page is correct, then upgrading to 8GB is a total no brainer. For under $50 you can add 8GB of RAM. Generally you can buy faster memory than a system requires and there isn’t any problem. So according to that page, your laptop needs PC3-8500, so anything listed as PC3-8500 or higher (PC3-10666, for example) or (just to be confusing) listed as 1066 or higher (1333 for example) should work. Now, Apple is known occasionally to do strange things, so if somebody more knowledgeable about your laptop says that it must be exactly PC3-8500, then they might be right.

I’d prioritize the memory over the hard drive, but doing both is going to be best.

Modern filesystems are good at not letting files fragment, that is, be stored split up onto multiple places on the disk. If the drive is nearly full (which yours is) then the filesystem can have hard time finding large enough contiguous space for new files.

I’ll trust the earlier post which said that replacing the memory and the drive in this computer is easy. Old PowerPC Macbooks required complete disassembly to replace the drive. If it is easy, but you’re not comfortable working on computers, then $35 doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. You might also check with the computer store and see how much they’ll charge if you buy the RAM and hard drive from them.

Macs do make it very easy to clone one drive to another, but copying 200GB+ of data will take on the order of several hours.

Given the age of that machine, I’d take a serious look at replacing the HD no matter what else you do (even if you don’t increase HD capacity.) Mobile HDs simply are not that reliable, and yours is already past what I’d consider its useful lifetime-- if you don’t swap it out it *will *fail and you *will *lose data.

If you don’t decide to swap the HD now, at least ensure your backups are current and understand that you may have to go computer-less for a few days when it does (inevitably) fail and you need to have it replaced and the backups restored.

The Seagate Momentus is the best thing I have ever bought in my whole life. Well maybe not quite, but close. It completely transformed my Macbook Pro from a stuttering, slow and unstable machine to the quiet speed beast it was meant to be. My wife makes fun of me because for at least a week, I’d shout out in joy every time I’d turn on my computer. Boot times went from ~5 minutes to under 20 seconds.

Although there is a good chance that your hard drive may be causing the slow downs, it’s a good idea to run a thorough check. You can use Disk Utility to diagnose your drive, but tools like the one below will give you a much more accurate assessment of the state of your HD.

http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php

Considering the way you describe your situation, I’d bet dollars to donuts the slow down is due to your low hard drive free space (unless the drive is dying). So if bang for the buck is what you’re looking for, try freeing up some hard drive space first and see if the system gets more responsive. As a suggestion, I’d say get to 30 gigs free, restart and see how that works.

And run Activity Monitor to quit any junk that’s running. We have a HP Management Tool that periodically tries to take over the HD until it stalls. Kill. Kill.

Thanks for the advice, everyone. I’ve been running the activity monitor, and it appears that my RAM is running very low when the beach ball pops up. I’d like a bigger hard drive, too, so I’ll have to shop around and see what I can do.