How can I boost the performance of my MacBook?

Solution 1:

Upgrade your HDD with a SSD

The hard drive is a common bottleneck in computing these days. This is due to the fact, that processors have become faster at computing. The hard drive cannot keep up with the CPU. Because it's slow, the CPU is not stressed as much as it could be: bottleneck effect.

See these videos for a comparsion of a SDD to a HDD in a Macbook Pro.

Upgrade RAM

If your amount of RAM is insufficient, you will see lots of page-outs. Data which should be written to the RAM will be written to the hard drive instead. Because the hard drive's input/output operations are much slower than the RAM's, this slows down your computer.

However, if your amount of RAM is sufficient already, you will not notice a benefit from a RAM upgrade.

You can check how much page-outs there are using the Activity Monitor.app which is located in /Applications/Utilities/. There are no official recommendations I know of as to what the ratio of page-ins to page-outs should be. Generally, you need to know that the more page-outs you have, the better your system could perform if you were to upgrade your RAM. I myself aim for a ratio of no more than 5 to 1 (20%, page-in vs page-out)

Activity Monitor → System Memory:

Clean install

If you installed the upgrade 'over the top' this will be like a 'software factory reset'. Mostly you'll notice a better performance because no other software has been installed yet.

Still, a clean install helps in removing remains of uninstalled software but should be an ultimate measure for tackling problems that do not want to be solved otherwise.

Solution 2:

When my 2007 MBP (also running 10.6.8) seems sluggish I check CPU usage in Activity Monitor. Typically it's a runaway flash process in Safari or Chrome. Find the offending page, close it, and the machine gets snappy again.

More ram really is a good idea though. I just put 6G in my laptop for $100.