I got my MBP in September 2007. SInce then it has been nicknamed "the bad apple".

I've gone through 2 batteries with it and currently it has a battery in that doesn't even charge so I can't use it unless it is plugged in.

Since I bought it I have changed the HDD for a 500GB one (I think it was a WD one) and bought an extra 2GB of RAM for it so it has 4GB now.

It's the 2.4 GHz C2D 15" model.

Anyway, over the past few months it has become ridiculously sluggish. The HDD has over 200GB of free space and I'm not sure what else to check with it. The CPU never seems to be under much stress. Even things like playing HD movies is bad. It stops and stutters all the way through them.

Is there anything I can do to try and get some speed out of it again?

EDIT - Can someone move this to the hardware page please

[Done. - ]

Not sure what the Mac equivalent would be, but if it were a Windows box I'd be getting you to try running chkdsk to check the integrity of that hard drive. Can often cause slowdown problems if it has issues.

Find an OS X install disk
Boot from it (reboot the MBP and hold down the 'C' key when it comes back up)
Run the OS X Installer app
Go to the menu and select 'disk utility'
select your hard disk in the menu on the left hand side, then click the 'verify disk' button.

Is it possible you swapped a smaller 7200RPM drive for a bigger 5400RPM one?

Jon

Thanks, will give that a go.

The small HDD was also 5400rpm so shouldn't have made too much difference (if any).

Tried running Onyx? Might be worth a try...

I know you have 4gb ram, but what is memory usage like?

Yes, along with OnyX (running all the options under its Automation tab) also try doing a Safe Boot (restart with the Shift key held down until you see the Apple logo), which will do some basic disk checks and clear certain cache files. Once you've logged into your normal user account, do a standard restart (which can take a little longer as caches are rebuilt) and see if things are a bit faster.

On a "normal" laptop, a drastic slowdown often indicates over-heating causing the CPU to throttle down. Cooling failure is usually due to dust or a failed fan, sometimes mechanical damage to the heat sink mounts or decayed TIM. Is there a way to check what the temperatures, fan and clock speeds are?

How sluggish is it exactly? Can you run a superpi to compare?

http://www.bresink.com/osx/TemperatureMonitor.html should do it.

I did a fresh install of OS X Snow Leopard (well 3 re-installs, as the first 2 didn't solve the problem) and the machine (iMac 24" Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz) runs much slower than it did under Tiger or Leopard. It feels more like a creaking old Windows XP machine with too little memory (2GB installed, around 800MB used)...

Booting takes an absolute age and starting applications is a complete pain. Probably one of the main reasons why I mainly use my Windows 7 machine these days.

I recommend installing AppleJack. You can start up in Single User Mode, type in a few commands and it will run through FSCK and lot of other stuff. That might help. I’d recommend AppleJack anyway as it removes the need to find a boot disk as a first step in diagnosing/fixing disk related problems.

Have a look at this Apple doc.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

Resetting the System Management Controller may well help, but also look at your list of startup items in system prefs/ accounts/ your account/ login items. I have found they slow my boot time and run background processes for apps I no longer use or need. my 2006 2.0 GHz iMac is still relatively spritely with attention these details and a little extra Ram

Periodically repairing the permissions rejuvenates my MacBook pro when it starts to slow down. Worth a try.

Cool. Just done an smc reset and verifying disk permissions as I type.

Well, the permissions could have been the cause of it.

The verify thing came up with around 200 permissions that were set incorrectly. It is currently repairing them.

Well, that hasn't fully worked.

Even playing iPlayer at HD brings it to a stand still and I get roughly 1 or 2 fps when it's playing.