MacBook freezes a lot

[Steele45]

I know this is an old mac and is expected to have problems but I have a mid 2009 MacBook Pro and whenever I start it up it will most of the time go to login, I will put in my password, then it goes to my desktop. Now, there a variety of things that happen, it could not even load my desktop at all and it will just freeze at login, or it will go to my desktop, show my background but not load the bar on the top of the screen or my apps or the bar on the bottom of the screen, (I forget its name). Or, it will start up everything fine but when I try to start or click anything it will freeze up and show the spinning pinwheel for FOREVER. Or it could load everything great and i can start up google chrome and start watching markiplier and it will eventually freeze google chrome, spinning pinwheel, try to quit google chrome, and that doesn't work, try to force quit, and then force quit freezes and then the finder freezes, and everything goes to sh*t. Also it reacts the same way during safe boot. I just tried safe boot and now the MacBook won't continue on from the screen with the apple logo...please help...it worked fine before....

 

[New_Mac_Smell]

It is an old machine...

Don't use Chrome, it's not particularly well written for Macs and is a memory hog at best. If it's being run on an older machine, chances are it's cannibalising what little power is available to render silly pink hair or something.

Use Safari, or I think you can get a Chrome light version (Canary?).

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Its 8 years old, it sounds like the logic board is going but if you are very lucky its the hard drive or the HDD SATA cable.
Try running a repair disk in disk utility see if that helps. If not then run SMART to test the disk if it comes back as corrupt with dead sectors etc then replace it with an SSD. To test the SATA cable remove the HDD and put in an external caddy (or just connect with a usb sata cable) and try and boot from there.

Here is a quick guide for troubleshooting the hard drive.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1145109/troubleshootailingharddrive.html

If its the logic board its probably just not worth the investment of fixing at that age.

 

[Fishrrman]

The other posters above are right.
At 9 years old, it's probably not worth putting $$$ into any more (unless you absolutely cannot afford to buy something new or [at least] "newER".

Time to start shopping for a replacement…