System chugging all of a sudden... what the dealio, yo?

Hello all,

Even as I write this, my Macbook is chugging (or slowing down) for some reason, and this has been happening lately where it almost never happened like a month ago.

To be more specific, when I enter text it's like there's a kink in a hose; no letters will appear and then a stream of all the letters I've been typing will pour out onto the screen. Prior to this happening I'll get the swirling whirling rainbow ball that I guess means the system is "thinking" or whatever. This is happening with all programs and when I switch tabs in Firefox.

Anyone also dealing with this?

I haven't really added much to my Mac recently that might cause something like this to happen. It's like it's getting brain freeze or something.

I'm also gonna throw this out there too - maybe Facebook chat has something to do with this? 'Cuz I'm on it right now and it's in full chug mode.

Anyway, any help/insight into this annoying new development would be much appreciated.

'Cuz the ol' Macbook was running perfectly not too long ago, and I miss those days.

Happy holidays!

 

launch Activity Monitor.. and watch and see if any application is hogging all your resources... keep watching it while you do things just to see.

 

Shows that Firefox is using the most percentage - 13ish. What does that mean?

Thanks!

 

Any sign of disk failure?

 

13ish shouldn't cause any major chugging along... so its probably something much more complicated, and not something normally seen. Could be something simple as corruption, or something as bad as hardware failure. You can try Hardware Test, or check the hard drive SMART status in System Profiler, but not a great chance those will indicate the problem.... also maybe look under All Messages in Console.app to see if theres any repeating or major errors coming off anything.