Stupid Robots

A slow computer is a pain to use, and trying to figure out what’s causing the slowdown can be a difficult process. Here are some steps I use to figure out what’s slowing me down.

The first step is to figure out what’s prompting the slowdown. If it’s happening at login or at startup, it’s probably a program launching in the background. You can see which programs are starting when you login by going to System preferences, then the Accounts pane. It should pop up showing your account. Click the tab titled “Login Items”.

This shows the various programs that start up when you log in to your account. I have a lot, but most people don’t have this many. Many of the programs that I have set to start up at login are helpers, that watch for an event to happen and then act on it. One item that almost everybody has is iTunesHelper, so don’t be alarmed about that one. If you see one that seems out of the ordinary, Google it to see what it does.

Startup Items are programs that run when your computer is started up, and there are a couple of ways that they can start up. The older (and more common) way to have them start is by placing a copy, or a link to the real program, in the StartupItems folder. These fodlers are in the root level of your hard drive. Be very careful of what you do here, as you can seriously muck up your system if you change a setting. The one in /Library/StartupItems/ is used by third party programs, and is where your trouble might lie. Check there, Googling odd programs.

If your computer is slowing down at seemingly random moments, you can try catching the offending program in the act using Activity Monitor. Activity Monitor lives in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder of your computer. Set it up so you’re looking at all processes, and they’re sorted by CPU usage.

Keep this program running, and when your computer slows down, look to see what program is using a lot of the processor (it can go above 100% if you have multiple cores). If you don’t recognize the program, Google it (sense a pattern?) to see what it does. If it’s something you can do without, quit it, either by using the Quit button in Activity Monitor or by navigating to the program and quitting it there. If the program is owned by another user, you will have to enter an Administrators name and password.

If your computer is still slowing down, there’s another way you can figure out what’s wrong. When a program is encountering situations it isn’t prepared for, it usually outputs an error or debugging message to a log file. You can view these log files using the Console application. This program also resides in /Applications/Utilities/. Make sure you have the all messages option selected, and then scroll back to the time your slowdown occured and see if an application was outputting a lot of logging messages at that time. If there is one, just treat it like you would if you found the offending program with Activity Monitor (Google, quit it).

There are other places programs can hide to autostart, and while you can find out if they’re misbehaving using Activity Monitor or Console, trying to stop them permanently is a tutorial too large for this article. As a push in the right direction, it involves the daemon launchd and the command launchctl in the Terminal.