This was bad even for the hardware it had, so I tried a few different solutions, including upgrading to OS X Lion, fixing disk permissions, and general hard drive cleanup (defrag, deleting applications and files that were no longer needed, etc.). From a cold boot, it took about 4 minutes to load the OS and stop thrashing the hard drive so you could open a browser or iTunes. When I first used this laptop in 2013 (four years after it was manufactured) it was running OS X Snow Leopard. A few searches online uncovered others who had similar setups and successfully upgraded them to modern performance standards with an SSD and additional RAM.
While it probably worked great when it was new, five years later it had become painfully slow (#firstworldproblems) with its 2GB of RAM and 160GB HDD. My fianc é has a 13″ MacBook Pro from 2009.
