MacBook suddenly struggling with web

T

tonym911

Registered
Hi, my partner's MacBook (10.4.11, 512Mb RAM) has suddenly (ie yesterday) started to get very sticky on the internet. Firefox produces spinning ball only followed by a crash about 2 mins later. It will come up with the home page readily enough in Safari, but ask it to show new pages in Safari after home page and it gets increasingly slow. After a couple of new page requests it hangs until Force Quitted (which takes a while on its own). Ask it to show all bookmarks in Safari and the browser crashes.
Have done Disk Utility repair permissions routine, emptied QuickTime download cache, checked free disk space (capacity 55.6GB, used 41.6GB, 13.9GB available). Any other ideas please? Do I have to reinstall OSX? Thanks for any suggestions.
PS For further info, this MacBook is the 'family' computer. Our two teenage kids use it for homework and MSN chat (a lot!). It's been OK until yesterday though.
 
Download this utility...
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15667/applejack

install it and then reboot into "Single User mode", (press and hold Cmd+S) while rebooting.

Follow the instructions to run "AppleJack", run each test manually, and at test #3 Clearing Caches, answer yes to clear cache for each User, you will not believe the junk it will get rid of.
This is the very best computer clean up utility for Macs there is, unfortunately it does not run on Snow Leopard (yet).
 
Wouldn't hurt to add RAM to that machine. Most macbooks I see running 512 MB of RAM are pretty much dog slow anyway. In any configuration you should be able to go up to 2GB.
 
More RAM might be nice but that doesn't explain why it's suddenly started going wrong – does it? Tried the Applejack clearout previously suggested but sadly that hasn't cured it (thanks though jbarley!). Going through Apps I notice that quite a few are either no longer working - eg iTunes, which doesn't come up at all –*or iPhoto, where the home page 'frame' comes up but then it permanently beachballs in 'loading photos' mode which won't even Force Quit, I have to shut down to get out of that. Calculator works, but Chess doesn't.

Just noticed some weird brown deposits on the edges of the keys to the right hand side of the keyboard. There's also some brown-ness around the entrance of the CD slot. Initial probing with a spare blank CD encountered a blockage. Further probing with a knife allowed the CD to enter but the CD-engaging noises weren't happening until the CD was almost all the way in. I pulled the CD out at this point. Could this be having any bearing on matters?
 
Internet is nominally 'working' but takes ages (minutes) for a new page to load, with constant beachballing. New pages will come up in an almost complete form but often without pics. Each new page will beachball for at least a minute before allowing any further action. YouTube comes up, eventually, but clicking on a video selection (for example) leaves a blank space where the video should be.
 
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