I'd like to know how my old MBP stands up against the current bunch but I can't seem to find any benchmarks or anything.

All I know is that I've recently noticed my MBP getting slower and hotter.

I'd possibly even think of getting an iMac instead.

Anyone know where I can see any comparisons?

Mine's been getting hotter. I think it's accumulated crud in the fans.

The solution, apparently, is to crack it open and give the fans a good blast to dislodge the muck.

Slower is another matter. It depends on how much free hard drive space you have, and when the last cache-cleaning session occurred. I tend not to restart my Mac that often, and I'm always surprised when about 5GB magically reappears on my hard drive space.

If you absolutely must look at numbers, then Xbench should have the marks for the newer machines - http://www.xbench.com/

I usually run OnyX over my Macs once every month or two, just to clear caches and optimise the system. Just run all the options under its Automation tab - the first reboot will be a bit slower while caches are rebuilt, but after that you usually notice things are a bit snappier, plus you reclaim some disk space too (always a good thing!). Generally, Mac OS X looks after itself but occasionally it doesn't hurt to give it a helping hand.

I'll have a look at opening it this week sometime.

As for the slower thing, my Mac is on pretty much all the time and I tend to use either only an external monitor or both of them.

The times when it gets painfully slow are when I'm using both monitors and working on my external monitor whilst watching TVCatchup or iPlayer on my second monitor.

The second monitor graphics are very slow and jumpy and the CPU temp goes up to 100C (at which point I've closed down lots of stuff).

I've also noticed that it is a lot slower when playing the odd game.

Are there any tools I can use to "clean" it and try to get it going a bit better?

Steve already pointed you at OnyX above.

That's your first line of attack. A weekly reboot wouldn't come amiss, I think. Cleaning the dust out is next, and deleting unwanted garbage off the hard drive should also be on your list of things to do.

I keep a lot of crap on my drive. I could delete a lot of it, but I can't be bothered. I'm considering a new internal drive sometime, rather than upgrade the whole machine.

Yup, will have a look at OnyX tonight. I typed my reply before I saw the post so sorry if it looked like I ignored it

Thanks for the help

I've taken the GMail approach: Why delete when you can buy a bigger drive!?

What spec is yours? What processor, how much RAM?

Generally speaking, the Core i3 is around 10-15% faster than a C2D of equivalent clock speed, the i5 and i7 a step up again, although the quad cores run much lower clock speeds, but are still faster than the dual cores in real terms, especially if the apps are multi-thread aware.

I don't have any Mac benchmarks, but the smallpt running on Windows 7: (see PC Pro Blog)

C2D E6600 3.06Ghz desktop processor : 652 seconds
Core i7-720QM mobile 1.6Ghz - 199 seconds

The Core i3/i5/i7 make a huge difference for multi-tasking/threading.

The MBP I have is a mid 2007 model.

CPU - 2.4GHz C2D
GPU - 8600M GT
RAM - 4GB PC2-5300 DDR2
HDD - 500GB Western Digital thingy (swapped out the old one myself)

In raw calculations terms, you will probably find a Core i3/i5 MacBook Pro to be around 4-5 times faster. Unfortunately, Apple don't do a Core i7 QM model at the moment - one of the reasons I went with a Sony when I upgraded my laptop.

In actual terms, because the hard drives etc. haven't improved performance to such a degree as the processor and RAM, you will probably find that in real terms, a new MBP will be around 20% faster.

The iMacs will be even faster, as they have stopped using laptop components and are now using desktop components, so they have a higher clock speed (and higher TDP) than older iMacs. The old iMac processors had a TDP of under 44W, the new Core i7 is over 90W - to put that in context, my iMac 24" (2006) has a power consumption of under 100W under load, the new 27" iMacs 365W!

Well I have solved my heating problems for the winter then. Just run Boinc on both my iMacs and it will be like a heater on 24/7.

Well, I opened up my MBP and there wasn't much/any dust.

I've run Onyx and done lots of the stuff on there. Repairing permissions, deleting cache stuff, and whatever else it does.

It seems to be doing ok so far but I haven't been putting it under the usual load.

I'll see what happens tomorrow.

If you haven't already, upgrade to Snow Leopard!

My iMac became unusably slow recently, so I re-installed Snow Leopard, including formatting the drive and re-installing my data. It made a world of difference, it feels fast again.

I had to re-install twice, the first time, I made the mistake of restoring my user profile and the Apps folder and the same slow-down and non-working bits re-appeared. It looks like there was a lot of crud in my profile, so the second time, I re-installed the apps I needed and restored my documents, audio, video and pictures, but not all the other profile crud. That sorted it out.