Agylen

If, after many months of usage, your Mac starts feeling more and more sluggish, and the disk is continuously thrashing at the minimum hint of activity on your part, like mine did, you should remember to perform a little maintenance.

Start with performing the periodic maintenance tasks that were never executed because you keep it stopped or off at night, when cron should execute them:

sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly

In my case, the weekly periodic script took almost one hour to complete. I guess it had never been executed in a little less than the two years I have been using this Powerbook.

Then, update the prebindings:

sudo update_prebinding -root / -force

Finally, fix the permissions using the Disk Utility (from Applications/Utility) program.

I did all of this today, after my Powerbook had become almost unusable. After having applied the latest security update, it even refused to come up again, showing the grey screen for an hour or so before I decided to power cycle it. Now it feels much snappier.