Hi all,

Girlfriend has a mid 2010 Macbook Pro, which is painfully slow. She only uses it for word processing, general internet use etc, but it regularly crashes, spinning ball, things take ages to load etc. Simple things like saving a Word document causes it to crash.
It’s getting to the stage where it’s incredibly frustrating to use, and she is considering replacing it. However, I am hoping I can sort it out for a little cheaper!

The spec is;
13″ mid 2010
2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
4 GB RAM
256MB NVIDIA graphics card
250GB hard drive (130GB free)

I plan to do a bunch of the standard clean up steps
(http://www.cnet.com/uk/how-to/five-tips-for-cleaning-and-speeding-up-your-mac/
http://lifehacker.com/5896699/how-to-speed-up-clean-up-and-revive-your-mac
etc)

Also thinking putting in 8GB ram will help? This from Crucial looks about right;
http://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/macbook-pro-%2813-inch%2C-mid-2010%29/CT3309354

Is that likely to make much of a difference? Don’t want her to spend £50 for no point (although compared to a new laptop it’s peanuts!)

Any tips would be great!

Thanks,
Duane.

Fit an SSD. My 2007 iMac now flies along although I was forced into it by the old hard drive going click. Click. Whirr. Dead.

Extra RAM will certainly help, but I’ve just upgraded mine (similar age) to Yosemite and for me the machine runs a lot better.

I use mine for InDesign and Photoshop work, so yours should do Word Processing with no problem.

Use CCleaner as well to clear out temp files.

I would be tempted to back up all data and reinstall the operating system. But yes to the 8Gb RAM. I have that in mine.

8gb will help and sad will help with boot up and shut down times but not necessarily normal running. My 8 yr old MacBook runs fine with 4mb ram and 1TB hybrid drive, but it only sees Internet use so no heavy software is running.

8gb of Ram will be almost £60 (Assuming the 4gb is using all the available slots). A 250 gb SSD can be picked up for £100 and will make a huge difference – effectively your swap file becomes nearly as fast as your RAM.

that should work fine as is for what you describe tbh, on the older os x 10.4 etc I used to use cocktail for clean up running cron jobs and the like, dunno if that’s still available.

tbh I’d consider reinstalling the os.

I have a 2010 MBP with 8 GB RAM and a 512G SSD, absolutely flies along, faster than our brand new 2015 iMac.

Cocktail is still available and running the 3am cron jobs can help clear out the logs leading to a speed improvement.
MS Office seems to have a memory leak on Mac which will eventually cause the programme/machine to fall over, having both Excel and Word running makes this worse.
Sometimes backing the personal stuff up and a disc wipe and re-install will sort it out. You might want to run a check on the disc health too as that may be failing.

Check on mac upgrades site. You might be able to go to 16Gb

My daughter has one of those (MBP 2010….) put a 250gb SSD in and its great now, cost about £70 on black friday

Blimey, everyone is an expert when it comes to computers, right? No sign of hesitation, authoritative as you like.

SSD will help, both with boot up times as well as program start times and general feeling of the computer being more responsive. Upping the memory to 8Gb is worthwhile – I have same spec MBP with SSD and 8 GB RAM and even so occasionally it runs out of memory. Last but not least updating OSX to latest version won’t hurt.

8 GB of ram should be enough if she doesn’t do anything too intense.

I’d also recommend an SSHD from seagate which is what I’ve put in mine. 8GB of SSD for OS, and regularly used apps and documents and a 512gb or more hard drive for movies or music or photos etc. I’ve got one in my 2012 macbook along with 16GB of ram (I record and produce music so it’s necessary) and it is like a completely new machine.

*edit* re-read the op and seen that she doesn’t use much storage, so could get away with just an ssd. However, and SSHD is a fair bit cheaper and still has a lot of the performance benefits, so I still wouldn’t write it off.

I wouldn’t be so quick to yosemite, got it on my mbair, imv it sucks wish I’d stuck with mavericks.

SSD & 8GB ram should help, got a little app called memory clean that keeps the ram ok when I don’t reboot between home and work, also check she hasn’t filled the thing up with movies and songs, it’s what they usually do to slow them down.

+1 for an SSD. Do that first.

On the subject, I have been given a MBP as above mid 09 though to do a screen repair on. He wants it wiping, updating and ebaying, with a fiddy fiddy split.

As a total mac newb, what do I do to wipe and update?

Memory will make a massive difference. Chuck in as much as you can as it is really cheap for the improvement. The other thing to look at would bra complete rebuild from scratch not just an upgrade to josemite. You should still be able to get half decent performance.

Stupid question – how do you copy your existing HDD contents over to an SSD?

Put new ssd in external enclosure.
Download carbon copy cloner & use it to clone your old drive to the new one.
Swap the drives & reboot & you’re done.

OP SSD will make the biggest difference. Also IME a single 8gb ram stick is cheaper than 2x 4 so you can add just the 8 and end up with 10gb (2+8) If you have the cash do both, if you can only do one do the SSD.

@wysiwyg – I think you just do a OS reinstall from the web (it’s one of the special command start up modes, look online). That won’t be a total “wipe” as such and someone could read the old files with special software I believe. My understanding is the OS will reinstall to version whuch came with the machine, you’ll then need to upgrade that to latest version which will run which will need an Apple ID. You may also need his administrators password if he has one. Sorry to be a bit vague.

Quick Q:

Can you install bigger SSDs on MacBook Air? I’ve a 2011 64Gb one and fancy a 500Gb SSD. Means I can flog my 2011 MacBook Pro.

OP, I installed more RAM and a big SSD on my wife’s 2010 MBP, and it transformed it.

The symptoms described in the OP sound remarkably like the issue I had recently (also a mid 2010 MBP).

If its running stupidly slow, that can be symptomatic of a HDD problem. In my case it transpired to be the SATA cable which was the culprit and is apparently a common problem on that particular model/year. You can source a replacement cable for about £20. fitting is a bit of a ball ache.

Check your hard drive smart status, theres a free to trial drive checker called driveDX (look out for high rate of CRC errors).

ps. you can add up to 16gb on that model.
pps. when you say crash, do you mean kernel panics, or something else?

I’ve just upgraded my 13″ 2010 MBP 🙂

512 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM from Crucial. They will sell you a pack with a little enclosure and the right screwdrivers for a few quid more.

The thing flies along now – but it has added suckiness because of Yosemite. I would stick to Mavericks if I were you.

Oh – it’s also worth noting that the 2010 only has the “slow” kind of SATA port (?) so its not worth getting an SSD with blistering read/write times. That’s what I read anyway.

how do you copy your existing HDD contents over to an SSD

Backup to an external disk using Time Machine, put in new disk (as others have said SSHD may give you a good speed-price-capacity trade off), use OS X Recovery to format and partition then restore from the Time Machine backup.

You won’t be able to use internet restore with older Macs (pre 2010 I think).

OS X is pretty good at managing paging so faster disk will give you more bang for your buck than more RAM for light users IMO. 4GB should be ok for Word plus browser etc.

I would start from scratch with the OS, you could get an SSD which will improve any computers performance. Wouldn’t bother with the RAM, thats a waste of cash. At the end of the day the CPU is the most important thing, and you are working with a Core2Duo, there is only so much you can do.

Sorry for the hijack,but I am about to buy a laptop for online marking,a wee bit of surfing,and apparently Minecraft. New i3/i5 laptop or spend the money on a second hand macbook?

go to applications, then utilities and open activity monitor. check you do not have an application using lots of cpu etc if you do, quit it and delete if not required.

I’ve a 2012 MBP, which was no slouch- 4Gb RAM.

I fitted an SSD in November and, even though it wasn’t a slow machine, the SSD has increased performance dramatically. Much, much quicker, quieter, and has longer battery life.

I backed it all up beforehand to a separate disk, removed the internal HD, installed the SSD, reinstalled the OS over wifi, restored my data back, and now use the old HD as a USB HD.

I would thoroughly recommend doing this.

All these experts and no mention of trim/trim enabler.
(I’m no expert either but if I was fitting an SSD to my macbook it’s the first thing I would be looking at re compatibility with different SSD’s)

Is she using Yosemite ? That totally killed my MacBook. I tried to rollback but I do t think you can as they no longer have it on the App Store etc (and I didn’t backup the OS).

Managed to recover it a bit by a clean install but it’s a bag of shite I reckon.

All these experts and no mention of trim/trim enabler.

Dunno about Macs, but Windows OSes have been SSD-aware from W7 onwards and the installer will deal with Trim automatically. I’d have thought recent versions of OSX would too?

the first thing I would be looking at re compatibility with different SSD’s

Are there compatibility issues? First I’ve heard of it if so.

Google Is quite useful if you need to know about yosemite, Kext, Trim and compatibility.
You wouldn’t have heard of it unless you were looking at using a third party ssd in a Mac.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/os-x-yosemite-and-third-party-ssds-heres-what-you-need-to-know/

http://www.cindori.org/trim-enabler-and-yosemite/

http://www.macworld.com/article/2849366/mac-wont-boot-about-yosemite-and-your-third-party-ssd.html

Blimey, everyone is an expert when it comes to computers, right? No sign of hesitation, authoritative as you

@lard this is STW 🙂

@mike yes you can put in 500 no problem, exterior dimensions are identical. For you and the OP your machines are SATA2 ( “old spec disk transfer /bus) so you don’t need the very latest fastest SSDs as they won’t run at max speed, so something like Samsung Evo is ok you don’t need Pro

I have had no issues with Yosemiti would recommend it.

At the end of the day the CPU is the most important thing, and you are working with a Core2Duo, there is only so much you can do.

@skids sorry I don’t agree at all with that part of your post. For most of us using computer for basic web browsing, documents, music and movie storage the CPU is the least important of the CPU, disk, RAM components. A 2010 Mac has moe than enough CPU, my 2009 Mini has more than enough CPU horsepower. Only if you do are doing intensive tasks like video rendering of game play do you run into CPU constraints and even then I am happy to run my movie transcoding overnight queuing up a few titles.

You wouldn’t have heard of it unless you were looking at using a third party ssd in a Mac.

… which I haven’t. Makes sense, “we don’t sell this so we don’t support it.” Ho hum.

Handy to know, ta.

I didn’t bother with trim when I upgraded this late 08 with a Samsung Evo 840 SSD, too hard basket.
It’s only a C2D 2.0, but runs Yosemite fine with 8 Gb of ram .

I put a crucial 500gb SSD in a MB and it worked fine.

Good point MrSmith- choice of SSD brand is critical.

This is the SSD I fitted in my 2010 MBP, it was the fastest model on the market at the time which I needed as I process 10s of Gb of photos regularly and it makes a huge difference in the processing time.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Toshiba-512GB-SSD-Drive-Read-534MB-s-Write-482MB-s-2-5-7mm-SATA-III-/370776711576?ssPageName=ADME:L:OC:GB:3160