2010 MacBook Pro to slow to use.

[Camelion]

Hello All
My wife's 2010 MacBook Pro has gotten to slow to use.
I am thinking of wiping the hard drive an reinstalling the OS.
Being a bit of a novice I am a little leary of doing this.
First question I guess "Is this necessary, or is there an other way speed it back up"?
If a total wipe is the answer, does anyone have a link I could follow, or tell me just how to go about doing this.
What version would be appropriate to install on it.
It currently has Version 10.9.5.
I should mention that I have a 500GB hard drive an have about 200GB free space.
4GB of DDR3 an running an i5.

Any help is very much appreciated.
Thanks

 

[JohnDS]

A total wipe is likely unnecessary. You need to address why the computer is slow. Here are some troubleshooting steps.

1. Right click on the hard drive icon in finder and choose GetInfo. How much free space does the drive have? If it has less than 15% free space, that will slow the computer down because it may not have enough room for caches and disk swap.

2. Open Disk Utility (found in /Applications/Utilties. Make a note of the S.M.A.R.T. status in the lower right of the window. If it shows anything other than Verified, your hard drive is failing and needs to be repaired.

3. While you have Disk Utility open, run Verify Disk and not if it shows any errors.

4. Download and run the free MalwareBytes for Mac: https://www.malwarebytes.org/antimalware/mac/

5. Download and run Etrecheck ( http://etrecheck.com ), which will do a survey of your Mac and create a report, and post the report back here.