Not sure if this is the right place, but I'm trying to figure out what's going on with my MacBook.

It's a 2008 MacBook. Anyway, it's always run fairly well for as long as I've had it. However, yesterday it started having major issues. I initially noticed the issue when chrome kept crashing and stating shockwave was the problem. Later, I noticed that all my programs were running extremely slow across the board.

I tried a simple restart, and it was taking immensely long to start up. The pinwheel comes up every time I click anywhere now including running any program from excel to safari. Also gave safe mode a whirl....but couldn't log into my account due to one of the keys on my keyboard no longer working.

Any ideas as to what's wrong?

Open up disk utility and verify it. You might have a bunch of bad permissions or the HDD might be going out.

@skullpanda1: thanks, I'll give disk utility a shot. I had intended to try before, but it was taking a long time for anything to start up.

I was just shocked at how quickly it changed. It was fairly fine and then the next day it started going downhill. I guess 7 years is a pretty solid run for a laptop.

Yeah, that sounds like an HDD issue. I would say to try a Disk Repair in Disk Utility, but I don't think it lets you do that to the drive on which you're currently booted.

To make this clear, back up your files now - your hard drive may be dying. It may be recoverable, but better safe than sorry.

What I would suggest (and I'm aware this is a huge pain) is to reformat an 8+ GB usb drive as OSX Journaled (using Disk Utility), then run the OSX installer to target it. This will turn that drive into a bootable OSX drive, which will allow you to start up using it instead of your system drive (by holding Option at boot and selecting that device), and from there you can run a Disk Utility repair without issue. There's no guarantee that will fix your issue, but it's a free and easy thing to try. Another nice thing about this is that it lays the ground work for you to do a fresh install on a new hard drive, if it comes to that. If your new bootable drive has enough space for the OSX filesystem and the OSX installer, you can run the installer again, booted to the USB device, and target the fresh hard drive to get it set up.

Sorry if that's more information than you wanted/are willing to try. I hope any of it helps...?

Sounds like a hard drive issue to me as well. Macs start to act funny when an HDD starts going.

If you can, back up anything you don't want to lose in case the drive goes in the near future.

@ben_h: yes, thankfully managed to back up important stuff to a flash drive before it really went south.

@thebrainninja: I'll definitely have to try and give that a shot. I hadn't thought about giving that a shot. Thanks!