My Mac is slow as shit, and no I don't know what happened. It is very possible that the Little Monkey pressed some buttons. What can I do to run a checkup or some such shit--other thanDisk Utility--so that this thing gets back to normal?

make an appointment to take it to the apple store

make an appointment to take it to the apple store

Hell no.

YouTube - Mac Video

An oldie, but a goodie.

heh, I like that.

Find your hard drive. Right Click->Get Info. If you're getting towards the last x% of available disk space, look up "mac slow indexing", as it's probably stuck in an indexing loop. Clear off some of the disk space, then follow the instructions to reset the indexes.

That's just my guess. Maybe little monkey was downloading porn?

I'm ok on disk space, but I think you could be right about the indexing anyway. That and the monkey pron.

Assuming a reboot didn't fix it, try Disk Utility --> Repair Disk Permissions. Also, fire up Activity Monitor - if anything is chugging lots of CPU, that might be the problem (post the name of the app here if it is).

Start with OnyX. If that doesn't help might be worth it to pick up a copy of Drive Genius2.

Are you using Time Machine for backups?

Also, which operating system? Is it up to date?

Yeah, using Time Machine. OS X 10.5.6, all up-to-date. I'm going to exclude some stuff in Time Machine. I also knocked out some RSS feeds to stop Spotlight from getting bogged down with indexing. Repaired permissions. Will try some of the other suggestions too. Things are getting better. Thanks for the help all.

Yeah, using Time Machine. OS X 10.5.6, all up-to-date. I'm going to exclude some stuff in Time Machine. I also knocked out some RSS feeds to stop Spotlight from getting bogged down with indexing. Repaired permissions. Will try some of the other suggestions too. Things are getting better. Thanks for the help all.

Yeah, spotlight can cause things to slow down especially if it's trying to index the drive you backups are located on.

When do you type in "xyzzy"?

Open up Activity Monitor (in Applications -> Utilities) and see if anything is chewing up CPU or memory. You need to change the menu at the top of the window to "Show all processes" first though. Then you can click on the column headings to change the sorting.

I have iStat Menus installed so i can see always if something is using up a lot of memory or CPU. Having a very full hard disk will also slow things down though.

reboot, hold down control-s. once you get to the command prompt, type (without the quotation marks) "fsck -yf" and hit enter. once it's finished, run it again. once that second time is finished, type "reboot," and hit enter.

Great advice, I'd forgetten about fsck. Actually, when that failed for me (I had a serious HD issue), I used Diskwarrior which saved my HD and data after Disk Utility, my Applecare CD, and fsck failed.

I read (on Apple's site I think) that fsck is not the preferred mthod when using 10.4 or later. Does this actually mean anything or is Apple full of horseshit?

they are full of horse shit. FSCK is what disc utility runs when you hit the repair disc button.

Those fuckers. I figured as much. Thanks.

I read (on Apple's site I think) that fsck is not the preferred mthod when using 10.4 or later. Does this actually mean anything or is Apple full of horseshit?

they are full of horse shit. FSCK is what disc utility runs when you hit the repair disc button.

Apple support asked me to run an fsck when I had my problem, and they knew I was running Leopard at the time, so fsck away!

Those fsckers. I figured as much. Thanks.

FIFM.

Apple's HFS+ filesystem is journalled, so if you hard-restart the machine, for example, it will just read the journal to figure out what needs fixing, instead of requiring a filesystem check (fsck). However, I have managed to end up with a screwed up filesystem irrespective, fixed by starting in single user mode and running fsck, which took quite a damn long time.

If the file system is screwed up, Mac OS X behaves horribly. For me, it was Firefox randomly deciding that clicking on links would do nothing and similar odd program behaviour. Some other things that commonly fuck up and now to fix them:

• Corrupt caches: Fixable with Leopard Cache Cleaner (Medium cache clean option on the last tab).
  
• Corrupt fonts: If screwed enough, will cause programs to pop up errors. They can be removed from /Library/Fonts or /Users/Yourusername/Library/Fonts depending what and where they were installed.
  
• You installed something, and by that I don't mean copied a program you downloaded to your Applications folder, but something with an installer: If the installer was the Apple one, start it up again and press command-i to get a list of files installed. Maybe it installed a plug-in or something that is causing whatever to screw up.
  

These suggestions continue to be helpful. Thanks everyone.