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Help to resolve Macbook Sluggishness

D

dansmith3003

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 24, 2007
29
0
My MacBook (now running mountain lion) has been performing very sluggishly for the past few months. It could take up to 3 minutes to start up where before it took 20 seconds and applications could take up to 15 'bounces' in the dock and then a further 10 seconds of the mac loading beachball before appearing on the screen.

Its a 2.7mhz 2011 MacBook pro with 8gb of RAM and I have only used 130gb of a total of 500gb available.

I have cleared the caches, stopped all login items. reset the pram, deleted all unnecessary languages, cleared any corrupted fonts and used 'clean my mac', yet still the system runs sluggishly.

I have noticed this sluggishness since upgrading to Lion from OS X Snow Leopard, which was very fast. I hoped that Mountain Lion may bring back the speed but it but it hasnt.

Has anybody got any ideas on how to resolve this issue? Am I missing something really obvious?

Thank you in advance.
 
Cleaning caches will not speed up your Mac, it will further slow down your Mac, as it has to recreate the caches upon use, thus adding to the sluggishness.
As for using CleanMyMac, it is not a recommended software to use, as it can actually harm your system and delete stuff, it needs.

If you have already looked at the performance tips GGJstudios provides, and they DID NOT help, you could try a Clean Install of Mac OS X (whichever version YOU prefer).

As for Mac maintenance: http://www.macworld.com/article/1133684/maintenance_intro.html
 
Irock619 said:
How do you delete languages?
Click to expand...

Unless you have a space issue, forget about it, this wont help speed up your Mac, avoid app`s like Clean my Mac they dont always help. Upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion for some was not a smooth as expected and this I see as your root cause.

I would be inclined to roll back to Snow Leopard and then go directly to Lion, or a clean instal of Lion. I am aware this is very drastic, however the sluggishness looks to have been induced on the upgrade to Lion and resolving this may simply be more complex given that ML is now the de-facto OS. Replacing the OS on a Mac is not so dramatic as Windows, a few app`s may need to be reinstalled the majority should be fine.

If you system is highly fragment iDefrag will make a performance increase, however unlike Windows this is something required very infrequently and in general those with very large files on the local drive benefit most. Dont expect miracles iDefrag wil help the system to feel "snappier" however it wont fix underlying problems.
 
Many Mac users think this is a Windows only solution but you should probably just do a fresh install of the OS. Back everything up, wipe it out and install a new copy. I have to do this every couple years with my Macs and Windows boxes.
 
InlawBiker said:
Many Mac users think this is a Windows only solution but you should probably just do a fresh install of the OS. Back everything up, wipe it out and install a new copy. I have to do this every couple years with my Macs and Windows boxes.
Click to expand...

This, and do it on a new SSD. You'll be snappin' around in no time.
 
Do applications run at normal speed with maybe occasional crashes once they've opened? If so, you could have a hard drive issue - use Disk Utility to verify your boot disk. This was what I experienced before the stock HD in my 2009 MBP died on me.

Even if the disk is fine, consider an SSD, as mentioned by the poster above me - you'll find it gets you working much more quickly.
 
Applications run perfectly when opened (That includes high intensity programmes such as CS5.5, Aperture etc.) It's just that the machine is sluggish from the point at which you turn it on through to when the app has established itself. About 1 hour into the MacBook usage the app's begin to run fine.
 
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