I just got my pc back in order, so now I'm trying to get my mac back up to speed. After trying various maintenance utilities, I've settled on Onyx, which seems to be pretty good.

The problem is that my macbook pro runs significantly slower than when I got it a year and a half ago. I get the beachball-pinwheel thingy constantly, even when just browsing websites. I'm switching from safari to firefox to see if that helps the slow browsing issue, but I also notice other programs are very slow. I can't really play half-life 2 anymore due to low framerate (it used to work flawlessly), and toribash takes longer to load up.

So I was running the repair permissions part of onyx and it said that ardagent has been modified and cannot be repaired. So I read that I should just delete it and that os x would create a new, unproblematic version of it. So I tried it, and now the computer cannot complete the repair permissions task. It still runs a bit slow too. Are these related? any tips?

Thanks!

Edit: I booted up from the startup disc and was able to repair permissions successfully. However the computer is still running slow and firefox is no better than safari. I've tried everything I can think of in terms of maintenance, except open up the laptop and see if it's dusty in there. Any suggestions?