I hate that rainbow beach ball

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Things have been so busy at my end that I barely have time to be online at this point. I answer some emails–usually days after I should–and post silly tweets once in a while. Sorry, folks. I have interesting things planned for March.

In any event, I’m quite concerned about my laptop. It’s a MacBook I bought in 2007 (bottom of the line, frankly) and it’s the machine I use for all of my writing.

Sadly, it’s not running very well. I get the Spinning Beach Ball of Death every day, and my programs (Safari, Thunderbird, iPhoto, YoruFukurou, Scrivener) become non-responsive for frustratingly long times. Often I’ll type a word and sit back while each. Letter. Slowly. Appears.

I just deleted the contents of my OS trash, some 13+GB, because my hard drive was nearly full (now it’s down to 57GB). Writey runs 10.5.8 and has been really great so far but as the day goes on the performance become worse and worse. I don’t want to have to replace it.

Does anyone have any suggestions for fixing this sort of thing?

I’m turning on comments on my main blog (for those of you reading this at a mirror site) to see whether my spam issue has abated. I’m heading off to do some work and I’ll check back later. Thanks for any help you can offer.