Need help troubleshooting very, very slow MBA

[glitch44]

My friend has an older (I believe Rev B) MBA and it's become very, very, very sluggish. Like 10 minutes to boot sluggish. Click a window, it beachballs, opens 30 seconds later.

I did a safe boot to boot faster.
Checked the login items-- only ituneshelper loads at startup.
Checked the activity monitor-- the CPU is NOT pegged. Only 2-3% for the activity monitor itself and nothing else.

I know he'd previously taken it to the Genius Bar and they'd reinstalled Snow Leopard. He has the HDD, not SSD, so it's possible the drive is failing, although the OS is still booting, just very slowly.

The only thing I can think of is to reinstall Combo Update 10.6.4, which I've read has fixed slow boots for some people. Or I could fix permissions/ run the weekly cron.

Any other ideas?

 

[Hellhammer]

Run Disk Utility. Sounds like the HD is going bad, I would try doing a clean install of OS X. After that, try booting from USB drive (install OS X in external HD) to see is the HD the problem. If he doesn't have an external HD, then just think about replacing the HD straightaway

 

[a2applegirl]

The hard drives on rev a and rev b air's are notoriously slow. My rev a air had an ipod drive as the hard drive. (ultimately this made the computer useless and is why I sold it long ago)

I agree with Hellhammer that it sounds like the hard drive is going bad.