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Catalina ruined MBP - help with my options?

C

chou

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 3, 2005
9
0
Hi All,

I have a 2014 MBP that i had held off upgrading for a while for fear of an upgrade slowing down my mac. I eventually bit the bullet and no surprise catalina has ruined it.... it now runs terribly slow on finder when browsing files, terribly slow in preview when editting e.g. 200 photos etc.

So far i have wiped my HD and reinstalled a fresh copy of catalina but its no better.

As i understand it i have 3 options:
  • Add more ram (my 2014 model is 2.6ghz dual core i5, 8gb ram) to say 16gb?
  • Buy a new laptop - however looking at 2018 models they are 2.3ghz quad core 8gb, will it be much better?
  • Try and create a bootable USB and downgrade back to yosemite.
What are peoples advice / thoughts?
 
Why don't you downgrade to Mojave. That would be the best choice from a security and update perspective.
 
chou said:
Hi All,

I have a 2014 MBP that i had held off upgrading for a while for fear of an upgrade slowing down my mac. I eventually bit the bullet and no surprise catalina has ruined it.... it now runs terribly slow on finder when browsing files, terribly slow in preview when editting e.g. 200 photos etc.

So far i have wiped my HD and reinstalled a fresh copy of catalina but its no better.

As i understand it i have 3 options:
  • Add more ram (my 2014 model is 2.6ghz dual core i5, 8gb ram) to say 16gb?
  • Buy a new laptop - however looking at 2018 models they are 2.3ghz quad core 8gb, will it be much better?
  • Try and create a bootable USB and downgrade back to yosemite.
What are peoples advice / thoughts?
Click to expand...
The RAM in your computer is not upgradable. Have you given the computer some time to finish indexing all your photos? There shouldn’t be a significant change in performance from your old operating system, so it’s probably worth trying to figure out what is the root cause of the slowness you’re seeing.
 
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how would i know if it has finished indexing? I have had catalina for approx 3 weeks and its been crap the whole time, today i installed the fresh copy and still crap?

if it answers the question i have also tried turning off spotlight for EVERYTHING and its still terrible...
 
chou said:
how would i know if it has finished indexing? I have had catalina for approx 3 weeks and its been crap the whole time, today i installed the fresh copy and still crap?

if it answers the question i have also tried turning off spotlight for EVERYTHING and its still terrible...
Click to expand...

Find Activity Monitor under /Applications/Utilities folder and run it, see what are highest CPU and Disk activity. In my case I did turn off spotlight exclusive everything and it was still busy accessing things and slowing things down; I had to find instructions online to type in some commands to really really turn it off.

Still, do regret Catalina upgrade, mostly because of one of those people who lost their Time Machine to error code 92.
 
I dont think it is an indexing issue however....

even right now with a completely fresh install of Catalina (done apprx 3 hours ago). Almost no apps installed (other than spotify and chrome) i open 185 jpgs (600mb) and try to resize. It would previously take perhaps 20 seconds and show a progress bar, its now taking 2 or maybe 3 minutes and crashing/ hanging whilst it progresses.
 
I recently installed Catalina on a friend's 4 year old MacBook Air with 4GB RAM and it was perfectly useable.

Is there anything highlighted by the tips in @sxdev's post?
 
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It’s possible that your issues aren’t actually directly related to the upgrade, since just upgrading to Catalina should not have the effects you are describing.

You can try booting from an external hard disk with a different OS like Mojave installed on it just to see if there is any change. And frankly I would recommend Mojave anyway since Catalina adds a lot of potential problems without that many benefits (slowness is not generally one of the problems, though).

I would also say that of course a new computer would be faster and not have these issues, but it shouldn’t be necessary since the 2014 models are still reasonably current.
 
ok just downgraded to Mojave (fresh install again) and its pretty similar! Any advice would be grately appreciated. An example of my issues are as above,

Opening activity monitor and it seems to be the apps:
"Photos agent"
"QuickLookSatelite"
com.apple.photos.ImageConversionService
 
No - used it before but clearly since the fresh install its trying to do some form of update.

I have tried turning off iCloud photos in preferences, but its still VERY slow just navigating through large picture folders in finder?
 
Google these processes you listed. There are a lot of posting with similar issues using these apps going back for several years.

Some can be fixed by doing this like turning off show preview when file selected and other features.

Also, have you recently upgraded you camera/phone gear to higher resolution. More resolution requires more CPU cycles to render previews.
 
You can "downgrade" to something like Mojave, but it's going to be a long, long, LONG, LONG "road back" to get things working again (see next paragraph).

You could have made things much easier, by choosing to create a BOOTABLE CLONED BACKUP using either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper BEFORE you tried to upgrade.
But "it's too late now". (cue up Carly Simon)

Your choices (as I see them):
- stick with "what you have now" and make the best of it
- downgrade to an earlier version of the OS (Mojave would be good)
- throw in the towel and go shopping for something new.

I WOULD NOT BUY a 2018 MBP due to potential keyboard problems down-the-line.
The ONLY currently-sold MBP I would consider is the new 16" model (with the scissors keyboard).

Unless you wanted the 16", I would either stick with the Catalina install (I dislike Catalina), or... "start over" with a Mojave install and try to "get back" that way.

Something to try:
Go to the users & groups preference pane.
Click the lock and enter your password.
Now, click the "+" sign to create a NEW user account.
Give it a simple name (such as "temp") and password.
MAKE SURE you give it administrative privileges.
When done, log out of your "regular" account and log into the new temp account.
Do things change? Does the MPB suddenly run better?
If it does, it could be something WITHIN YOUR USER ACCOUNT that is "gumming things up".
Again, just something to try. The temp account can be deleted when you're done with it.
 
Hi,

I got the same problem. Have a Mid 2014 MacBook Pro Retina. Before I upgraded to Catalina it was running Mojave. I had absolutely no problems with it. Was running fast and the battery life was good. Ones I upgraded to Catalina it was a huge nightmare. It became super slow, got really hot and battery drained super quickly. So I decided to downgrade to Mojave again. I still had a backup from when I last used Mojave. So I thought it wouldn't be a problem. But now I have the same problems under Mojave as I had with Catalina. It somehow ruined my MacBook permanently. It seems as if Apple has somehow designed Catalina to permanently destroy your MacBook. I am really pissed since I would have a perfectly working MacBook if I wouldn't have updated to Catalina. Don't know what to do and if there is a fix for it.
 
Snoobie92 said:
I got the same problem. Have a Mid 2014 MacBook Pro Retina...
Click to expand...

I suspect there is somethings else going on here. Catalina should be OK(although not as slick as Mojave for many) on that machine (13 or 15").
 
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