MacBook Pro has become Slooooooow....... Help?

Hi

My Macbook Pro has been slowing down recently, but all of a sudden has now become unstable. It hangs badly, especially when waking it up from sleep, or if I click on a link from say an e-mail. Often Safari fails to respond, and I end up quitting and restarting it. Excel, Word, preview etc take a long time to open. I have searched and tried a few things -

Repaired Permissions
Checked Disk Utility
Reset SMC
Reset PRAM
I have also run Bitdefender - it showed nothing
I tried 'Clean my Mac' but did not purchase the full app, simply ran the free version
I have about 165GB of 500GB left free on the disk
It is updated to latest software
Activity monitor shows a shed load of stuff all there - I have no idea what most of it is and I am not confident of deleting any in case it is critical to start up or something and I cause more issues (Kernal Task - WTF )
However I have had it for over 4 years and it has been faultless until recently. I think I might need to wipe it and re-install it, but I am not confident on doing this. I do have a 'time capsule' on my network which is backing up OK. But I am not sure how to do it so that I put it back to how it was. For instance will my e-mails be as they were prior to a reinstall, i.e. will the unread, read, different folders be as they were exactly?

Any help / advice would be gratefully received.

sounds like something running in the background. does anything in Activity Monitor show as using tons of CPU?

Download Onyx http://www.titanium.free.fr

It is a very effective and powerful (and free!) utility that has helped me on several occasions. Do take notice of the various warnings it gives you about its potential to alter important stuff if used blindly. And of course make a bootable clone of your disk before using it. I use Carbon Copy Pro for this.

Or, if one is relatively nearby, book yourself in to the local Apple Store Genius Bar. I have always had fantastic service and advice from them. And it is free!!

Have you got updated RAM and an SSD by any chance ?

My i7 MacBook Pro came with 4GB RAM from build.

It is now upped to 16GB and I fitted a Crucial MX100 500GB Solid State drive. This made a massive difference.

Your e mails will come back mate when you log back into your e mail accounts.

Is it possible you have some malware in there?
I've used Macs since the mid '90s, and never had one slow down. However, I occasionally back up, wipe the drive and do a clean install

cookie said:

sounds like something running in the background. does anything in Activity Monitor show as using tons of CPU?

Click to expand...

This is what I think I am seeing on the Activity monitor - CPU running some apps at over 100% - Memory exceeding the 4GB that I have installed. I have stopped systemstats? via the activity monitor as it was one of the culprits. A suggestion was to do this via Terminal but it was a 'sudo' command and required a password and my password did not work, it is the only one I have ever put into this computer ......... It has helped but there are still hangs and it is still temperamental.

chrisjk said:

Download Onyx http://www.titanium.free.fr

It is a very effective and powerful (and free!) utility that has helped me on several occasions. Do take notice of the various warnings it gives you about its potential to alter important stuff if used blindly. And of course make a bootable clone of your disk before using it. I use Carbon Copy Pro for this.

Click to expand...

I liked the look of this until I saw 'make a bootable clone' - too technical for me and I would risk losing everything

paul08 said:

Or, if one is relatively nearby, book yourself in to the local Apple Store Genius Bar. I have always had fantastic service and advice from them. And it is free!!

Click to expand...

Sounds like a trip to Bluewater might be the answer then, I just need to book an appointment. I didn't realise this service would be free ?? Amazing

Pukmeister said:

Have you got updated RAM and an SSD by any chance ?

My i7 MacBook Pro came with 4GB RAM from build.

It is now upped to 16GB and I fitted a Crucial MX100 500GB Solid State drive. This made a massive difference.

Click to expand...

No updates and like you had it is 4GB RAM & 500GB hard drive. I have read that the very latest operating systems and some programmes are memory hungry, but it had been really good and fast until very recently, so I think a wipe clean and fresh re-install would be my first option, just that I am not confident doing this myself.

Millmax said:

Your e mails will come back mate when you log back into your e mail accounts.

Click to expand...

Thanks for that confirmation.

filbe said:

Is it possible you have some malware in there?
I've used Macs since the mid '90s, and never had one slow down. However, I occasionally back up, wipe the drive and do a clean install

Click to expand...

It is possible but nothing I have used has shown any to be there. As I said Bitdefender keeps giving me a clean bill of health....

I am not going to complain though, after Windows even as it is it is still far less frustrating, but when all was well it was exceptional...

Hi,

Have seen something similar before which turned out to be spotlight indexing in a loop.

You may wanna google disabling spotlight index and see if it helps- if not genius bar is always a good place to start.

filbe said:

However, I occasionally back up, wipe the drive and do a clean install

Click to expand...

Not necessary - in more than 50 mac.years I've never wiped and reinstalled except for a failed disk or partition.

Make sure it's backed up immediately before you take it to the Apple Store. Just in case.

It is worth stating that you need to book a slot online at the Apple Store genius Bar. You could probably turn up unannounced mid-week (especially if you get there first thing), but forget it at the weekends. Just too busy. So get online and book a slot

stolzy said:

Not necessary - in more than 50 mac.years I've never wiped and reinstalled except for a failed disk or partition.

Click to expand...

Depends on what 3rd party software you run!

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201516

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262

Sorry to hear the Mac is slow but I know the feeling and after all the things you tell us it seems a third party issue. When I hear bitdefender,genio,cleaner ,little snitch I get sick because they are loading as a kernel task and you have little co and over them and I sugest to remove thes things . You did the Smc , pram and permissions and if you had external devices disconnected whilst doing so you have new values on the ports and electrical components and system permission are correct. Now after removing those wannabe optimists please start the Mac in safe mode with shift key holding at startup. This will block some kernel extensions and repair some permissions again.

After this check if good or not and use a test user ( admin ) like my article describes to see if your behavior is on tha system or user specific only, And last resort before going to store is erase and install like you see in article

Cheers

it sounds like some sort of search indexing is going on.

try turning off search or whatever it is.

I read and COPIED the following technical article re speed. I believe it may even be from this site and its from am Apple technical guy;
Macbook Re set for speed
QUOTE:
There is a few questions i want you to ask first before I will try to sort your issue. First of all are there any other devices connected to the Mac? The next one is, do you have a slow reaction time when you do a search with spotlight ?the third one is do you experience issues in your Browser(Safari) in particular opening Video content like tube,vimeo ? and last are there updates available in the AppStore ?

your Activity Monitor shows absolute normal values and just in case you're still hoping to go to previous versions of Software, ditch the idea please. Also there is no need to run third party products to test the mac, all they can do is what the mac can do on its own without help from outside.

Verifying and repairing the Diskpermissions was a very good thing to do, but might not have solved all the problems.


Steps ....
As it was Mentioned and you might have done it already is reset SMC ....The SystemManagement Controller is a *Fuseboard* and decides what component gets what power when.Shut down the computer.
Plug in the MagSafe power adapter to a power source, connecting it to the Mac if its not already connected.
On the built-in keyboard, press the (left side) Shift-Control-Option keys and the power button at the same time.
Release all the keys and the power button at the same time.
Press the power button to turn on the computer.
Note: The LED on the MagSafe power adapter may change states or temporarily turn off when you reset the SMC.

2.
reset the pram. because you had a HD replacement after the update the MacBook might be confused with what components are built in. Same again no other devices connected and go as follows
Shut down your Mac.
Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (⌘), Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
Turn on the computer.
Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.

3. if when searching spotlight is slow old files might have issues to find their Applikation because since the update they have changed. To rearrange the Finder do this please From the Apple () menu, choose System Preferences.
Click Spotlight.
Click the Privacy tab.
Drag a folder or an entire volume (your hard drive) to the list.
If prompted for confirmation, click OK.
Remove the item or volume you just added to the list by clicking it and then clicking the minus ("-") button.
Close Spotlight preferences.Spotlight will re-index the contents of the folder or volume.

4. For Slow Video content in the bowser the best thing to do is to empty the Caches. After a update the might get stuck in a loop. When you open the Finder and look at the Menubar on top you see GO click on Go and then press the ALT ⌥ key you will see the Libray appear in the List ....click on it and search for the Folder.......Caches ......drag and drop the complete Folder onto the desktop and restart the computer afterwards.


After you have done all this I'm very confident things will be fine. If not let me know cheers ......i will go for a spin now

References
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2409

Hope that is helpful, but it is someone else's genius so I take no credit

Just to thank all for their help and advice on here

I did do pretty much everything suggested and although they were moments of slight improvement it was still not right. I went to the Apple store and they eventually found a software conflict that was causing the thing to try and constantly repair in the background all of the time taking up all of the memory.

It had to be wiped and reset and once re-installed was back to normal ........... Until I re-installed Rapport on line banking security programme. This caused it revert. I deleted and uninstalled it and e-mailed them and they replied saying that it was a known issue and there is now an updated version that overcomes it.

In the meantime I think I will upgrade the RAM. I can only go up to 8GB two lots of 4 one in each slot. Any suggestions as to the best place to obtain these from?

i usually buy RAM from Crucial

Check that it really is limited to 8 Gb RAM.
My 2012 MacBook Pro with intel i5 is stated by Apple to max at 8Gb but will actually accept and use 16Gb.