MacBook Pro 15'' Early 2011 - very poor performance, Mountain Lion

[aoaaron]

I'm unsure what to do. I've posted before and clearing my harddrive to give it an extra 100GB of space or so worked temproarily however, the problem is now back.

Details:
MBP Early 2011, 4GB RAM on Mountain Lion with 150GB free harddrive space of 500GB.

Upon a fresh restart, my MBP works beautifully enough opening up all the programs I need very fast.

The programs which I have ALWAYS running on mountain lion are: Messages, Utorrent, Facetime, Evernote, Google Chrome, Finder, Mail, Microsoft Word, Preview, Dropbox, MplayerX (idle) and iTunes.

These all load up properly and take up about 2.5-3GB of RAM.

However, the longer my laptop is on, the more sluggish it gets. Especially after waking from sleep. Just now, Google Chrome crashed and I had to force quit it. I then reopened chrome and it took 20 seconds for it to open again with one rainbow wheel hang.

Questions:
Is it worth organising an appointment with apple under apple care? Will they do anything about it?
My worry with this is the problem takes an hour or two.. or sometimes a day for it to happen. Then after a restart, the problem does go away for about an hour so although its consistent, its one of those things whcih at the apple store they might not appreciate.
Or shall I buy more RAM to up it to 8GB?
I need my medical videos and music with me at all times so an SSD might be out of the question.
Could my harddrive be failing?

I find a 2 year laptop to be performing this poorly under the new OS (and it was playing up a bit with lion) really horrendous considering although I have a lot of apps open, I'm not exactly video editing. photo editing or anything heavy.

 

[GGJstudios]

If you're having performance issues, this may help:

Performance Tips For Mac OS X​

 

[duervo]

Stop using uTorrent. Switch to something like Transmission instead for your Bittorrent needs.

 

[desi1]

Check activity monitor to see if you are paging out on RAM. It just sounds like you have insufficient RAM.

 

[aoaaron]

i reset my vram/pram logged into safe mode and used onyx... made my system even worse.

im going to backup and try and reinstall now.

 

[GGJstudios]

i reset my vram/pram logged into safe mode and used onyx... made my system even worse.

im going to backup and try and reinstall now.

PRAM/NVRAM has nothing to do with your issues. Resetting it will not help.

Follow the instructions I posted earlier, and post screen shots after you've completed item #5.

 

[aoaaron]

I jumped the gun here and did a reinstall. Formatted and reinstalled via the Mountain Lion recovery and wow... everything is very very fast.

I've installed evernote, dropbox, synced mail/calenders, opened messages, evernote, Mplayer OSX extended, downloaded and opened transmission.. everything is going so smooth and fast.

so I'm now worried about copy and pasting back my old files.

I have:

100GB worth of medical videos
100GB worth of music or there or there abouts.

I am planning to bring back my music, along with replacing the itunes library file with this one. should i do this? Itunes is so snappy ATM so I'm apprehensive as to if the large music library was causing the problems with my mac?

any help please?

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I am also about to buy RAM from here http://www.scan.co.uk UK, can someone please tell me which RAM to select for my MBP early 2011 model.

 

[duervo]

My iTunes Library is over 1.5TB is size ... I'm sure you'll be fine.

If you want to add your media back in from scratch, just be patient as iTunes will have to process everything again. Once it's done, things should be ok.

My money is on uTorrent causing most of your issues. There's a relatively large thread about uTorrent for Mac on the uTorrent forums. You're not the only one that was most likely running out of physical memory as a result of uTorrent.

 

[aoaaron]

Thank you, I guess I'll still try and get in the 8GB or 16GB of RAM.


Shall I rebuild the library from scratch or just drop in the old Itunes file? I would like to have my playcounts etc. still remaining there.