Macbook mid 2010 -help, super slow

[justperry]

it's stuck, the time has went from 8 to 44 minutes, my patients is wearing thin tonight so I think I'll just leave it opened over night and see what happens, do you think it will hurt it to go into sleep mode while its installing? if I didn't have my iPad through all this I think I would've thrown my MacBook out the window by now lol

Don't put it to sleep, just dim the screen and leave it.

Yeah, frustrating.

 

[chicklebird]

Don't put it to sleep, just dim the screen and leave it.

Yeah, frustrating.

i liked, i toughed it out and it only took about 10 minutes to restart this time, so maybe that's a good sign? i'm still getting the horrible spinning beach ball when i load a new page (this usually stops happening about 3 hours after a restart, don't know if that provides any insight into my issue) but it's working better as of right now

just wanted to let you know and say thanks again, this time i really am going to bed

 

[justperry]

i liked, i toughed it out and it only took about 10 minutes to restart this time, so maybe that's a good sign? i'm still getting the horrible spinning beach ball when i load a new page (this usually stops happening about 3 hours after a restart, don't know if that provides any insight into my issue) but it's working better as of right now

just wanted to let you know and say thanks again, this time i really am going to bed

Later on look if it has the same behaviour in a clean User Account, if it is, a complete reinstall might be the only way out.
But, if it shows up after a clean OS you know it is hardware.

Running Apple Hardware Test might show Errors, if not it is still not 100% sure not to be HW.

If you have any external data carrier at hand, even a USB stick (Min. 8 GB) is OK, you could install a clean OS on it, start from it (Yes it is slow but after loading in RAM it should be OK) and see if that is better, if not it is sadly HW, probably the GPU.

 

[l.a.rossmann]

Grab a program called ddrescue. Set it to try and copy everything to /dev/null. It reports errors. If it has errors, it could be time to replace your drive.