Anybody able to offer some Mac help?

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 issue. 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.

Any ideas as to what's wrong?

Same thing happened to my moms, but I have no idea what was wrong with it. 

I'm sorry it couldn't help.

Do you have an apple store nearby?

Sorry for all the grammar issues prior to the edit. Autocorrect is not my friend!

Anyway, yes i do have an Apple Store nearby. I'm just hesitant to bring it in and spend a lot of money to fix it since it's going on 7 years old.

Whenever I've gone they have never charged me just to tell me what was going on or if they could help me. I always just make sure I'm super nice to them and let them know I'm not too tech savvy, but not a complete newb and they've always been glad to assist.

Otherwise another option if you want, and what I did with mine when it was crapped out, I traded it in to best buy and got a TV :lol:

In the PC world, you can generally solve that just by reformatting / reinstalling the OS.  It's the nuclear option, but it's guaranteed to work if you have no idea how else to fix it.  You should be able to do the same thing on a Mac without issue, but then again, I've heard of Apple restricting their users from doing even simpler routine tasks on iOS and such, so YMMV.

just install linux on it, it is free

OP, it sounds like the hard drive may be going out in it.  I would find something to do a diagnostic test of the hard drive and see if that's the issue.  Random lockups and slow startup may be a sign of a dying hard drive.

Reformatting the drive and reinstalling the OS would be a good idea if you can check the hard drive and find out if it's viable or not.

It may be the HDD. There is a S.M.A.R.T. thing that supposedly reports the status of the drive. I've never seen it say anything other than "Verified", but it's worth checking. Run Disk Utility and select your HDD in the side bar. I mean select the part that says the capacity and type of disk. Then at the bottom it will say "S.M.A.R.T. Status: ". If it says something other than Verified you're going to want to back up any important files ASAP.

Also, never listen to what PC people say about what you can and can't do on a Mac, because they are clueless. You can definitely reformat and re-install, but I think if the S.M.A.R.T. status is bad that's not really going to help as then your drive is failing.