Story goes:
I have an early 2011 macbook pro, one of the ones that has the dodgy graphics cards which everyone has been lobbying for Apple to fix on warranty, mine has been broken since last October. Finally they offered a fix and I took it in for a service two weeks ago and they replaced the logic board on the new warranty.

When I got it back I was all excited to get it going again however upon power up the machine was incredibly slow, so slow the mouse lagged all over the screen and everything took an age to work.

I thought it could be just the computer clogged up and also was thinking I would upgrade to Yosemite. I decided to try and do a clean install of Yosemite which was fairly simple. I managed to get this done quite easily via creating a USB boot drive etc.
(the computer was also really quite slow whilst doing all this).

Once it was installed it was still incredibly slow so I thought I would just try an internet recovery back to it’s original OS and see how that worked, again relatively slow.

I tried an upgrade to Yosemite and it was still slow. After lots of research during this whole process I have found various tips and things to try to speed it up and problems that could be with Yosemite the main things being:
– Verifying disk permissions
– Verifying the drive
– Resetting PRAM
– Resetting SMC
and various other user interface based things to no avail!

Nothing has worked! What confuses me most is that looking at the activity monitor the CPU usage is extremely high and spikes constantly however in the seperate processes there is nothing happening? CPU is more often than not running at above 60% and often at 90% +

I am thinking that the cause can only be hardware related and that they have installed the new logic board incorrectly? However I don’t know enough about that to be able to say whether it would be the problem or not?

Anyone any ideas?

Thanks!

I can’t really help, other that suggesting you get Apple to sort the problem for you seeing as it’s only started doing it since they had it, but just wanted to say it’s adorable you took a photo of your screen.

For future ref: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201361

Also, you are only viewing ‘my processes’ in activity monitor. Change the view to ‘all processes’, and see if the culprit shows up.

Menubar > View > All Processes in activity monitor.

Edit: Long shot, but how long did the slowness go on for? As depending on the size/contents of your HD, then Spotlight can slow things down while it initially indexes the drive.

Ha! I was about to suggest using Grab.

Agreed: you should take it back into Apple. As you say, there’s nothing on the Activity Monitor to correspond with the load represented on the graph.

haha thanks for your concern but the issue is that it would have taken me about 10mins just to get a screen grab and upload it to photobucket via the laptop in question because of all the things I just described so yeh, old skool screen grab.

I would suggest Spotlight re-indexing the disk as well…

Click the cog top left and show processes from all users, then sort by cpu.

Screen grab with shift-cmd-4 then drag a box – screenshot on desktop.

I bet it’s mds which is the indexer. Set energy saver preferences so it won’t sleep for hours and leave it to it overnight, should let it sort its act out.

With regard to indexingy I read that it might be that however dismissed it thinking it would not need to do it (to the same extent) as I had formatted it before the Yosemite lean install. I have a 500gb hdd just fyi.

So you think indexing is the culprit despite the reformatting? Could someone possibly just explain briefly what indexing is/what it is doing?

Here we go. Kernel task using a nice 700% of my cpu 😯

Given the above post, Spotlight/indexing can be ruled out…

So you think indexing is the culprit despite the reformatting? Could someone possibly just explain briefly what indexing is/what it is doing?

I can tell you how to rule it out.

Go to Spotlight options in System Preferences. Hit the Privacy tab, then drag your HD from the desktop, or add via the + button, onto the pane. This will exclude Spotlight from using, and therefore indexing your HD. If problem persists, then it ain’t Spotlight indexing your drive.

Make an appointment with a Genius, and get them to sort it out.

Edit: As an aside, did this start doing it from the off, or had you installed some 3rd party apps/drivers first?

Like this since I got it back from the repair, as soon as I switched it on. At that point everything from before the gpu died (reason for repair) was still installed.

Reformatting hard drive and installing new osx meaning no third party apps installed gave same results