Two years on, my Mac is feeling more PC every day (1 Viewer)

Hrmm...My MacBook Pro is close to two years old and it's feeling more like a crufty PC. Sometime last year, it stopped sleeping of its own accord. It would only sleep if manually triggered or when the lid is closed. Now, after sleep, it loses all internet access. I have to reboot it after opening the lid to see the internet.

I've really enjoyed my Mac and been a fan and advocate since the switch. But OS X gets degrades over time the way Windows 98 did, ultimately requiring a reinstall to work correctly, I'm going to be very disappointed.

I guess I need to contact Apple support and ask about this network issue. And the sleep issue.

My name is DaveF and I have doubts about my Mac Religion

Dave, you might try the suggestions here:

Lifehacker - Clean Up and Revive Your Bloated, Sluggish Mac - Mac OS X

There are other lists like this and there may be better ones, but the advice seemed to be pretty solid. I came across it today so it was recent in my memory/history.

For system maintenance, you might want to consider...

Apple - Downloads - System/Disk Utilities - OnyX

- Walter.

OnyX comes highly recommended in a bunch of different circles. The article posted above also recommends it. These little freeware programs are nice because they keep you out of the Console which is intimidating to some people.

After posting, I ran System Update to get 10.5.7; that seems to have fixed the internet-loss problem.

I dabbled with Onyx early on but it seemed redundant to OS X's automatic processes; but I'll take another look it along with the other links.

Perhaps I need to make a sacrifice at the temple (and buy something from the Apple Store )

Glad the update helped. Normally the automatic process take care of most of the cleaning for you, but if the computer is not on at the correct times you can end up with some hefty log files that slow things down. Onyx evidently forces them to run which you can also do in the Console. I haven't had a problem on my personal laptop, but do have to run various maintenance commands from time to time at work.

I'd take a trip to the Genius Bar and have them scope it out. There is no shame in letting someone who deals with this every day look through things.

The thing I'm seeing mostly with people who complain about sluggishness is the folks who add on UI 'enhancements' and stuff that defeats the clean way that OSX is supposed to work. And even worse is anything that has an 'installer', Adobe CS4 I'm looking at you. If something doesnt just quietly and happily go into my Applications folder I really question whether I need it or not. The more you pile stuff like that on the less OSX it becomes and more like a frankenpc.

I've been to the Genius Bar for some major problems -- some early hardware failures. I've not been about the insomnia problem; past PC experience taught me that help desks were not usually helpful on those sorts of complex issues. But maybe a trip would be helpful. My machine literally has a screw loose, too, that I'd like replaced. It sticks out a tiny bit and scratches the desk.

I'm pretty sure we all have some screws loose =)

Sam