Our 4 year old mac book pro has started running incredibly, unusably slowly, accompanied by constant whirring of ?the hard drive. Anything I can try to diagnose or fix at home? Everything seems to “work” but at a slower than slow pace, so, for example, typing takes about 10 seconds to appear on the screen.

Any ideas?

Sorry wrong forum, bugger!

Repair permissions is the usual first thing to do.

http://www.howtogeek.com/195912/how-when-and-why-to-repair-disk-permissions-on-your-mac/

Woah there. Before you do anything, make a backup of everything you don’t want to lose if the drive is failing.

I suggest you also google how to read the hard drive’s SMART status as well, the drive could be failing and that will tell you. Also, how often do you reboot it, how much ram is free and how much hard drive space do you have free?

Woah there. Before you do anything, make a backup of everything you don’t want to lose if the drive is failing.

this. my iMac started playing up a couple of weeks ago and I only managed to get half the stuff off there I wanted before the drive nuked itself.

now fitted with a shiny new SSD, a fresh install of yosemite and positively zipping along for a 6yr old machine.

My Macbook goes incredibly slowly when it’s < 4% battery. As soon as I plug it in, it immediately starts working fine. Odd. Only just started happening too (OS update?).

I doubt this is your problem.

Open up activity monitor and see which apps/processes are using the most CPU time / Memory / Disk / Network. Then go from there. There are hundreds of other forums around where there are nerds who will troubleshoot / sift through your error log files and tell you what to do. Might be worth asking somewhere other than a bike forum.

As a diversion: I’d like to plonk an SSD in my 2013 Macbook Pro. Would I notice a difference? I’d put the OS and applications on it.

Is it really much quicker?

Get a windows based laptop?

Sorry couldn’t resist answering in the style of the apple fabois, when anyone complains about their windows pc going slow

Stop downloading porn

bigger wheels?

As a diversion: I’d like to plonk an SSD in my 2013 Macbook Pro. Would I notice a difference? I’d put the OS and applications on it.

Is it really much quicker?

Big time.

Mine’s a 2011 and it’s phenomenally quick since I upgraded to SSD. Restarting from cold takes less than 30 seconds and loading Photoshop takes a few seconds instead of about a minute.

The only issue is lack of capacity – unless you buy a huge SSD (which is still pretty expensive) then you’ll have to compromise on space. I have mine set up with an SSD as the main drive and the old 320Gb 5600rpm drive in the space for the DVD drive. Works for me – best of both worlds. Although of course my compromise is that I can’t use the CD drive.

mine is rebooting itself sometimes 4 – 6 times a day. it’s fab. (same age machine)

use activity monitor in utilites folder in your applications folder, see if there is an application working hard in the backround.

My Macbook goes incredibly slowly when it’s < 4% battery. As soon as I plug it in, it immediately starts working fine. Odd. Only just started happening too (OS update?).

I know nothing about Macs but I expect this is by design. It battery failure is imminent it makes sense for it to try and use as little juice as possible.

Educated guess: you’ll find by running activity monitor and sorting by CPU or disk access that it’s “mds” causing the grief. That’s the indexer, and when it kicks in big style on a HDD you know about it.

If so, try just letting it run its course. E.g. plug in the power, set sleep time to “never” and leave it over night.

going to say indexer / Spotlight regrouping itself..

@TomB – download blackmagicspeed test – and run it. It’s a disk speed test. I suspect the disk is on the way out so as per @gofaster make a back up now, if you don’t have a backup device sign up to dropbox/google drive and and least get the most important stuff saved/uploaded. The machine can run really slow when the disk is nearly full but the GF’s 2012 Mac HDD is dying and the machine runs like a DOG ! (I upgraded RAM from 4 to 10 and it helped but it needs a new disk which will be a 256 or 500 SSD when I get time)

Tell us how full the disk is and also how much RAM you have (full disk and 4gb ram is a really bad combo !)

@cody – yes it will be transformed ! In terms of speed you have something like (using blackmagic) the following (so you will get 3-9 times the speed). A 250gb SSD is about £100 these days

Stock HDD running fine 75
Stock HDD running slow 35

Modern HDD (7200rpm) 110
SSD 250

I don’t think your machine is SATA3 (latest up to date internals for disk data transfer) but if it is you can get SSD at upto 500

Thanks all, I’ll pick up an SSD.

@cody – have a search on MacRumors forums, my 2 cents

watch ifixit and other online how-to guides
get an enclosure (external usb box) so you can setup/clone the SSD without touching the machine until its all working and also keep the original disc for backups etc
buy a Samsung EVO (don’t think you need a pro) or a Crucial
250 or 500 if you can afford it / want it (IMO cost saving for 120 isn’t worth it)
lookup the various command key startup options – allows you to try and boot from the ssd in enclosure before you take machine apart.
SuperDuper is a good cloning programme I’ve used (some people recommend clean install and that has it’s merits but it makes copying over data/programmes more time consuming). Other people recommend Carbon Copy Cloner

I have a 2010 MBP.
The only time it went on a go slow was after downloading Rapport security software from RBS banking.
I gave it to a man who got rid of it (with difficulty!) and all was well.

Sweet- thanks jambalaya. Will most likely be the 250.

RELATED QUESTION: Where is a good place to shop for an SSD? Are crucial any good? IS there much merit in getting a pricier one?

(I’m looking to replace my MBP HDD for similar reasons to the OP)

EDIT: Just read Jambalaya’s post, rendering my request redundant. Thanks, J

I’ve just upgraded my late 08 macbook with 8Gb of ram & a Samsung 840 Evo 250Gb SSD.
It was running really slow after upgrading to Yosemite, but now it’s flying.
Max out the ram would be my first recommendation.

@kiwi 8gb ram is more than enough for most of us (I upgraded gf’s machine to 10 as 1×8 chip was cheaper than 2×4). Whilst this has helped her machine the hdd is clearly sick so replacement is needed

Right, the go slow has stopped for now, without intervention, but does briefly occur intermittently, along with the whirring (fan? Disk?). I’m following the suggestions above and have a back up. Ram is 4gb, the HDD is nowhere near full, 227gb free out of 250!.

Disk permissions repaired and Mrs B is now able to get her work done on the thing, fingers crossed!

Good news. Whirring could be the fan as you say. I do suggest you download the blackmagic test.

OP, I have a 2012 MBP and mine started working incredibly slowly, with the fans whirring all the time.

Turned out something had gone pop in the logic board – a temperature sensor – and that it was throttling the CPU to keep it from what it saw as overheating – though of course it wasn’t!

If you run the Apple Hardware Test utility then do a scan it’ll confirm whether or not there’s a sensor failure.

Mine was fixed under warranty (on the last day!!) but if not, it’s a pretty hefty repair bill.

I gather it’s a known issue and Apple have been repairing them as goodwill gestures even if its out of warranty. If it keeps happening, that could be it.