Macbook Pro slow after shut down and reboot

[2TallGreg]

Hey everybody. I've got a weird problem with my Macbook Pro. Sometimes it runs SUPER slow. It seems to happen after it's been shut down and then rebooted. It does not seem to happen when I just do a restart. But it's incredibly irritating because it lingers for hours before it gets up to speed and restarting it after this happens doesn't fix it. I just have to wait it out for a coupe of hours and it is slower to compute than my 10 year old PC.

I've got 16GB of RAM
I'm not running lots of programs
I have almost nothing in the dashboard
I've run Onyx software to try to clean the mac
I have plenty of room left on the hard drive
THe Activity Monitor does not show that there is significant activity
I am not running a time machine backup or anything at the time.

I have a 2011 (I think) 17" Macbook pro that I bought refurbished almost a year ago (could be the problem?) but I don't want to have to take it in because I'm super busy and I rely on it for my job.

Has anybody ever heard of this problem before?

Thanks everybody!
Greg

 

[justperry]

Make a new User Account, preferably Admin, then restart and log into the new Account, still the same or not, if not the normal User Account has problems.

 

[thekev]

Just so you know, Onyx won't make your machine faster. It can clear a couple cache files. The optimization checkbox refers to prebinding, which hasn't been relevant for years. Permissions repairs tend to cover things where an application has inadequate access to make necessary changes. As for your problems, are you getting the spinning wheel? I noted the lack of rogue processes.

I noticed 16GB of ram. While I like lots of ram, it is a good idea to test any memory upgrades. If you do get bad sticks or ram that fails quickly, errors can cause a lot of weird behavior. That is probably one of the first things I would check. Download memtest and let it run in single user mode. If it's not that I would look at connected peripheral devices in case of driver conflicts. It sounds like hardware though, and ram is the place to start. If you get any errors, replace the bad sticks. As a secondary precaution if you have to replace ram, test the new dimms too, and reinstall the OS after they pass in case of errors caused by the old ones. The drive should have a recovery partition, and you can use a combo update after that. If you don't see cpu problems and you have that much ram (assuming you're not using nightly developer builds that are leaking memory) it is almost always some piece of hardware.

I hope that helps.