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Lude2Envy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 25, 2011
7
0
I have an early 2011 13" MB Pro. I believe it was the first one to come out with a core i5. It was the best laptop I've ever owned. However, over the last 2 years it seems like it has gotten progressively slower. First when I upgrade to Lion and again when I upgraded to Mountain Lion. I also upgraded it to 8Gb of Corsair Mac Memory about a year ago. I feel like this is a trend with Apple since every iPhone I've owned has gotten slower and slower with each iOS update. Will resetting the SMC and PRAM fix this problem or should I revert back to Snow Leopard? It takes forever to boot and opening applications takes a lot longer than it used to. I do format the hard drive and start with a clean OS install about once or twice a year. Thanks for the help.
 
greetings!

I own a MBP 13 from 2009 and it is still running fast and strong (recently added a SSD though, but it was running fine before as well). Also on ML and added 8 gigs of RAM.
First off how much free disk space do you have? If it is below 20 gigs, that could cause the slowdowns. Also do you have a lot of programs starting on login? If so: disable the ones you do not need.

Have a look at your Activity Monitor and check if something is eating up your CPU capacity.
Could also be your HDD slowly failing. Any suspicious behaviour recently?

Best regards
 
I have an early 2011 13" MB Pro. I believe it was the first one to come out with a core i5. It was the best laptop I've ever owned. However, over the last 2 years it seems like it has gotten progressively slower. First when I upgrade to Lion and again when I upgraded to Mountain Lion. I also upgraded it to 8Gb of Corsair Mac Memory about a year ago. I feel like this is a trend with Apple since every iPhone I've owned has gotten slower and slower with each iOS update. Will resetting the SMC and PRAM fix this problem or should I revert back to Snow Leopard? It takes forever to boot and opening applications takes a lot longer than it used to. I do format the hard drive and start with a clean OS install about once or twice a year. Thanks for the help.

Could be a hard disk, but generally machines slow down over time with use over time and its normal. Perhaps using Disk Utility, shrink your current partition down 30GB or so and create a new partition there, and install your base OS that came with the machine there, and compare the performance?
 
I suspect Apple deliberately inserts some lag every time they update MacOSX, that way they make you think your computer is outdated and you buy a newer one, the same happened to me when I updated from SL to Lion, the UI lag was horrible in Lion, ML has been suffering from scrolling lag ultimately.

Sometimes I think I should have stick to SL on my early 2010 iMac.
 
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Nothing in activity monitor bogging it down nor do I have a lot of startup programs. I have over 100Gb of free space on the HDD. I want to upgrade to an SSD but it should still run faster than it is without one. On a side note, are the early 2011 models SATA II or III?
 
hmm that's strange... could still be the HDD failing.
I'm not 100 % sure on this but I think you are stuck with SATA II.
Have a Samsung 840 (non pro) in mine and it is blazing fast despite the SATA II bottleneck.

sorry for not being of any help
 
hmm that's strange... could still be the HDD failing.
I'm not 100 % sure on this but I think you are stuck with SATA II.
Have a Samsung 840 (non pro) in mine and it is blazing fast despite the SATA II bottleneck.

sorry for not being of any help

The i5's are SATA III
 
Yeah I thought they were SATA III but wasn't positive. I just built a new desktop so I'm gonna have to wait a bit before adding a SSD to my MacBook. What do you guys recommend? I have one crucial in my desktop for windows and 2 OCZ's for apps. They're both decent. It seems like a lot of people use crucials in macs.
 
I believe you have the 5400rpm drive which is painfully slow.
As data builds up, your HDD will become slower and slower.
Get an SSD.
My 7200rpm drive booted in 18~25 seconds.
After SSD installation, it boots in under 10 seconds.
 
The guys above maybe right. It might be that your HDD is failing. I suggest that you make a backup of your files now!
 
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