2011 MacBook Pro Running Very Slowly

[cambookpro]

Hi,

The past few weeks I've noticed how sometimes my MBP will just crawl to a halt. I rarely get a beachball, but clicks can take 5 seconds to register, Spotlight won't respond, Safari won't open a new tab quickly, Mission Control takes forever to activate etc.

The specs are 15" early 2011, 8GB RAM (aftermarket), 750GB 5400rpm HDD, 2.2 Quad i7 and the AMD 6750M.

Interestingly, since (December? Ish) I've verified my disk three times, and twice it came back as corrupted and needing repair with the recovery partition. Also, I get kernel panics about once a week, but almost always when I'm not using it for some reason. RAM often goes into 1-2GB compressed after a day of normal use - not sure if that's good or bad.

The system is also migrated from probably around 2003 - I haven't really ever done a clean install since OS X came out.

Not really sure what the culprit is here. It happens fairly intermittently - some days it works fine, others it's almost unusable. A lot of the time, I switch to our lesser specced 2010 iMac (3.06 i3) as it seems a lot faster!

Any help would be much, much appreciated. Thanks.

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Forgot to mention - it takes over two minutes to boot as well.

 

[simonsi]

How full is your disk?

 

[cambookpro]

Tad under 500GB filled of 750GB.

 

[simonsi]

When it gets slow, bring up activity monitor for the cpu and post what it is doing.

Not happy about the disk verify etc but the space look fine, suspect a new disk and fresh install would improve things (ideal time to swap to an SSD of course), do you have a backup like Time Machine? If the disk is starting to play up you may need one...

 

[cambookpro]

When it gets slow, bring up activity monitor for the cpu and post what it is doing.

Not happy about the disk verify etc but the space look fine, suspect a new disk and fresh install would improve things (ideal time to swap to an SSD of course), do you have a backup like Time Machine? If the disk is starting to play up you may need one...

Full backups on and off site of all files since 2012, so not too concerned there.

I would love to swap for an SSD but can't really justify the price considering I'm planning on upgrading in around a year, and large capacity ones are still fairly expensive. Would consider a hybrid, but not sure if they're actually worth it?

CPU is usually low, however there have been occasions where things like dictation and iBooks Web Content have been using a lot. Never one thing consistently, always random and weird ones.

Thanks for the help.

 

[simonsi]

Full backups on and off site of all files since 2012, so not too concerned there.

I would love to swap for an SSD but can't really justify the price considering I'm planning on upgrading in around a year, and large capacity ones are still fairly expensive. Would consider a hybrid, but not sure if they're actually worth it?

CPU is usually low, however there have been occasions where things like dictation and iBooks Web Content have been using a lot. Never one thing consistently, always random and weird ones.

Thanks for the help.

Then you look well setup for a format and fresh install, will just take some time but no $$$ so worth doing....

 

[lsh]

My daughter's did this a few months ago. (2011 macbook pro 15") VERY, VERY slow with bouts of activity, usually just after reboot.
Took it to Apple store, and they found corrupted OS so they told us how to repair that (off the recovery partition). It seemed to work well. We quickly did TM backup. I'm guessing you could find how to diagnose that via google - I'm afraid I don't remember.

That fixed it for a few days and the problem happened again - final answer: hard drive was beginning to fail. It was covered under Apple care that we did thru a 3rd party Apple Service provider - closer to her school. They were able to transfer the data.

Now she's getting Application memory issues so I get to figure that one out.

 

[cambookpro]

Then you look well setup for a format and fresh install, will just take some time but no $$$ so worth doing....

My daughter's did this a few months ago. (2011 macbook pro 15") VERY, VERY slow with bouts of activity, usually just after reboot.
Took it to Apple store, and they found corrupted OS so they told us how to repair that (off the recovery partition). It seemed to work well. We quickly did TM backup. I'm guessing you could find how to diagnose that via google - I'm afraid I don't remember.

That fixed it for a few days and the problem happened again - final answer: hard drive was beginning to fail. It was covered under Apple care that we did thru a 3rd party Apple Service provider - closer to her school. They were able to transfer the data.

Now she's getting Application memory issues so I get to figure that one out.

Thanks both for the help.

I'm considering doing a full restore but it's a time consuming process, so would have to be a) whilst I'm not doing anything important on it, and b) when I have a few days off so I can fix anything that goes wrong in the aftermath. Luckily, I'm off for a week soon so will hopefully do it then.

lsh, I had this problem on my other MBP, albeit not with as many other factors that I'm facing now. Took into the aStore, they said my OS was corrupted but a few weeks later the HD just failed Luckily had a good backup, they're so important nowadays!

 

[yjchua95]

I've got an early 2011 15" with 2.3GHz quad core i7, 16GB RAM and 1GB Radeon 6750M. When I bought it with a 7200rpm drive, it was okay-ish at first, and into its first year, it was getting unbearably slow (I had also upgraded the RAM from 8 to 16GB).

Blackmagic tests showed that the drive was still about fine with speeds of around 100MB/s.

The same thing happened to two older MBPs of mine with HDDs. So when the 840 Pro SSDs became available, I bought a few of the 512GB variants, installed them into my Macs, and problem solved. To this day, they're still running real fast (I'm talking about 11 second boot times and no lag in overall usage).

 

[NewishMacGuy]

Full backups on and off site of all files since 2012, so not too concerned there.

I would love to swap for an SSD but can't really justify the price considering I'm planning on upgrading in around a year, and large capacity ones are still fairly expensive. Would consider a hybrid, but not sure if they're actually worth it?

CPU is usually low, however there have been occasions where things like dictation and iBooks Web Content have been using a lot. Never one thing consistently, always random and weird ones.

Thanks for the help.

Good thing you have backups because this thread reads like imminent HD failure.

FWIW, I have a 2011 that I bought off of CL 18 months ago as a holdover to an affordable 16GB/512GB rMBP and immediately installed a MoXT hybrid. That was well worth the minimal cost and has completely obviated the need for me to upgrade to a 500GB SSD (just can't justify the cost) and forestalled the need to upgrade to an rMBP for the foreseeable future.

All to the benefit of my wallet at the cost of satisfying my gadget-seeking side.

>

 

[cambookpro]

Good thing you have backups because this thread reads like imminent HD failure.

FWIW, I have a 2011 that I bought off of CL 18 months ago as a holdover to an affordable 16GB/512GB rMBP and immediately installed a MoXT hybrid. That was well worth the minimal cost and has completely obviated the need for me to upgrade to a 500GB SSD (just can't justify the cost) and forestalled the need to upgrade to an rMBP for the foreseeable future.

All to the benefit of my wallet at the cost of satisfying my gadget-seeking side.

>

Yeah, I'm really glad I have backups! I'm going to look into hybrid drives, they seem pretty inexpensive so it's worth a go.

I, too, am waiting for a relatively affordable 16GB/512GB rMBP - though at the moment they are around £2k, I'd like them to drop to £1.5kish. Ah well, maybe next year - hopefully the price of flash storage will continue to drop.