Author Topic: Slow Running Macbook Pro  (Read 1136 times)

Slow Running Macbook Pro
« on: 13 November, 2018, 03:40:49 pm »
Afternoon gurus! As per title, I have a 2009 MacBook pro which of late, has become almost unusably slow. Some functions are better than others, but Safari, for example, seems really bad along with iTunes / photos and opening PDFs and Word Documents.

I've tried all the obvious stuff I can find online, such as running the First Aid utility. I also tried downloading a Mac Cleaning tool and ran that, plus manually deleting gigabytes of old files to free up space.

Still very slow after all that so I thought I'd ask here before handing it to someone along with a bundle of cash!

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Slow Running Macbook Pro
« Reply #1 on: 13 November, 2018, 04:03:18 pm »
The Mac cleaning tool might be part of the problem.

I'd download MalwareBytes from this link and run it - it should tell you if your cleaning app is malware!

Make sure you haven't filled the disk up - you should have at least 10% space free on it. If the disk is full you get slowness and may even lose files.

If you are up to date with OSX then slowness can come from having a hard disk rather than an SSD and a newer version of OSX - they are designed for SSDs

If you want to see what is taking up processor time, or doing a lot of disk access, open Activity Monitor, which is in Applications : Utilities
- there are tabs on it for CPU, Disk etc.

It is simpler than it looks.

ian

Re: Slow Running Macbook Pro
« Reply #2 on: 13 November, 2018, 04:53:57 pm »
My old Mac Mini 2009 runs fine on whatever the last version of MacOs it supports is, so it should be OK. That does have an aftermarket SSD added. It's still surprisingly spritely for a computer that wasn't exactly over-specified when it was released and that's nearly at the grand age of ten.

As Jaded says, run Activity Monitor and see what's using the CPU and memory. If it's an old Macbook, it may well let you feed it extra memory – paging to a spinning hard disk is slow.

You may want to do some tidying up – clear the Safari browser cache etc and temporary files. Macs are generally quite good at tidying in the background, but sometimes things get forgotten. Stay away from random cleanup apps though, they may add more cruft than they clear up.

Re: Slow Running Macbook Pro
« Reply #3 on: 13 November, 2018, 06:03:00 pm »
Thanks for your replies. The disk has north of 35% free space and when I run activity monitor, nothing jumps out as having a particularly high CPU usage figure.

I shall try running MalwareBytes to see if that helps.


ian

Re: Slow Running Macbook Pro
« Reply #4 on: 13 November, 2018, 08:13:33 pm »
Click on the 'memory' tab. Generally, memory used should be less than you have – if memory is being written to disk (because you've run out), you'll see it under 'swap used.'

My busily indexing because it's not been switched on in a while (mds process at ~45%, Dropbox at ~15%) early 2009 Mac Mini is using 2.8 GB (of 8 GB). That's running El Capitan with an SSD.

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Slow Running Macbook Pro
« Reply #5 on: 13 November, 2018, 08:58:38 pm »
My elderly 17” MBP was transformed astonishingly by the introduction of an SSD.
It is simpler than it looks.

ian

Re: Slow Running Macbook Pro
« Reply #6 on: 13 November, 2018, 09:04:24 pm »
It's the single best thing you can do. It's hard to go back to spinning rust, everything is so slow.

If you want to eek a couple more years out of the machine, if Google is to be believed, it's straightforward to swap out the HDD for an SSD.

Gattopardo

  • Lord of the sith
  • Overseaing the building of the death star
Re: Slow Running Macbook Pro
« Reply #7 on: 14 November, 2018, 04:42:26 pm »
Afternoon gurus! As per title, I have a 2009 MacBook pro which of late, has become almost unusably slow. Some functions are better than others, but Safari, for example, seems really bad along with iTunes / photos and opening PDFs and Word Documents.

I've tried all the obvious stuff I can find online, such as running the First Aid utility. I also tried downloading a Mac Cleaning tool and ran that, plus manually deleting gigabytes of old files to free up space.

Still very slow after all that so I thought I'd ask here before handing it to someone along with a bundle of cash!

What is the spec of the machine, what is the battery like and what os?