MBP slowing down.

[Macdeez]

Hi guys, I bought my 13" MBP a year ago and right now its not running as efficiently as it has before. Many programs take much longer to load, the laptop is not as quick as it was, sometimes it gets stuck and this happens quite often, the battery life has significantly been lowered and now with mid brightness and the keyboard lights off while only browsing the internet I get 3-4 hours at 100% even though I regularly charge it to 100% and deplete the battery because I was told that doing that helps maintain my battery life. I honestly don't know why its like this, is it natural that this happens?

I also upgraded the RAM from 4GB to 8GB and that did not really help. I was thinking of completely formatting the system as I do have many unnecessary programs and files that I'd like to get of, and maybe it'll help my battery life. I want to keep a couple of things like my music and some movies etc, would it be able to back those up individually from the time machine as my machine is regularly backed up to my external 500GB HD or would I have to save them on the external HD and copy them to the formatted system?

Let me know what you guys think I should do!

Cheers

 

[GGJstudios]

Hi guys, I bought my 13" MBP a year ago and right now its not running as efficiently as it has before.

Performance Tips For Mac OS X

I regularly charge it to 100% and deplete the battery because I was told that doing that helps maintain my battery life.

There's no need to do that to maintain battery life. Run on battery whenever you need to and plug it in whenever you can. You can plug or unplug at any time, regardless of the charged percentage. Just make sure you don't run on AC power all the time, as your battery needs to be used regularly to stay healthy. This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:

Apple Notebook Battery FAQ​

1. Launch Activity Monitor
2. Change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes"
3. Click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top).
4. Click on the System Memory tab at the bottom.
5. Take a screen shot of the whole Activity Monitor window, then scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot
6. Post your screenshots.

 

[Macdeez]

there's no need to do that to maintain battery life. Run on battery whenever you need to and plug it in whenever you can. You can plug or unplug at any time, regardless of the charged percentage. Just make sure you don't run on ac power all the time, as your battery needs to be used regularly to stay healthy.

I usually run on AC power but not for longer than a couple of days as I usually take my laptop with me to uni, but as of recently I've been trying to run on battery to keep it healthy as you said.

 

[Robin Chung]

Memory running out or HDD intensive tasks are usually what slows the machine down. I've had a Macbook Air (2011) and the Sandy Bridge Macbook Pro and in everyday tasks the former is faster believe it or not.

The tips already posted is a good place to start.

 

[GGJstudios]

I usually run on AC power but not for longer than a couple of days as I usually take my laptop with me to uni, but as of recently I've been trying to run on battery to keep it healthy as you said.
View attachment 338638

View attachment 338639

Nothing jumps out as a big resource hog in your screen shots. You may need to take more screen shots at a time when you're experiencing slower performance. Be sure to go through the performance tips I posted, especially the first 3.

You do have some paging activity. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

 

[Macdeez]

Ok I'll look into everything you talked about and see what happens, thank you so much for your help it is very appreciated!

 

[Medic278]

Ok I'll look into everything you talked about and see what happens, thank you so much for your help it is very appreciated!

You could consider swapping out your HDD for an SSD. Depending on how much space you use a 120GB or 180GB SSD could do the trick and you'll see some pretty impressive performance gains. Adding an SSD is like breathing new life into your machine. I put one in my MBP and I think it was worth every penny and now my machine does stuff almost instantly.

 

[BanterClaus]

You could consider swapping out your HDD for an SSD. Depending on how much space you use a 120GB or 180GB SSD could do the trick and you'll see some pretty impressive performance gains. Adding an SSD is like breathing new life into your machine. I put one in my MBP and I think it was worth every penny and now my machine does stuff almost instantly.

This. I added a SSD into my MBP and the speed gain is incredible. I only have it in the slower SuperDrive location and it is still insanely fast. Almost instant boot and barely ever have loading screens while in use. I doubt much more RAM will be effective, 8GB seems to be working fine.

 

[Medic278]

This. I added a SSD into my MBP and the speed gain is incredible. I only have it in the slower SuperDrive location and it is still insanely fast. Almost instant boot and barely ever have loading screens while in use. I doubt much more RAM will be effective, 8GB seems to be working fine.

Yeah the SSD really packs a punch, I have the 240GB Intel 520 in my 13" dual core i7 and it flies. I also have 8GB of RAM and that with the SSD make for a really impressive machine. Everything just flies and programs files open almost instantly. You definitely won't be disappointed if you go for an SSD and since you have a newer MBP you should have SATA III to take full advantage of the 6gb/s transfer speed.

 

[Macdeez]

I guess that could be an option since you guys have such positive thoughts about it, what brand of SSD would you recommend? I'm a student and can't afford to be spending too much but I will have some extra spending money left over after my finals so I'll probably do it then.

 

[Medic278]

I guess that could be an option since you guys have such positive thoughts about it, what brand of SSD would you recommend? I'm a student and can't afford to be spending too much but I will have some extra spending money left over after my finals so I'll probably do it then.

I went with an Intel 520 series best buy currently has the 120GB version for $199. I chose the 520 because it got reviews and went through 1 year of testing before being released so there wouldn't be any compatibility issues. Installing it was a breeze as was transferring all of my files over. The 520 also comes with a 5 year warranty which is nice as most others are only 1-3 years. However if the 520 is out of your budget then I would get either a Crucial M4 or an OCZ Vertex as they are also both very highly rated.

 

[Macdeez]

Would it be risky to look for a second hand SSD on eBay? I'm always trying to save money but if I have to I'd rather buy a new one. Also what is the possibility of the SSD breaking down or failing?

 

[Macdeez]

I've done a bit of research on the SSDs and I read that prices are going to drop soon, is that true and do you guys think they would drop by a significant amount? The performance of my MBP is really bugging me but if I would save a significant amount of money by waiting a month or two I would rather wait.

What do you think? And as for the question I posted about looking for used SSDs, is that risky or not?

 

[Weaselboy]

I've done a bit of research on the SSDs and I read that prices are going to drop soon, is that true and do you guys think they would drop by a significant amount? The performance of my MBP is really bugging me but if I would save a significant amount of money by waiting a month or two I would rather wait.

What do you think? And as for the question I posted about looking for used SSDs, is that risky or not?

You may want to read over this thread. There has already been a big dip in prices recently and I suspect this will continue. How fast or how much prices will continue to drop is anybody's guess.

SSD drives seem to either work right away or not at all. I suppose the risk in used is if you install it and it does not work, what options do you have as far as en exchange. It would have to be a really huge savings for me to even consider a used SSD. JMO.

 

[xlii]

Before adding a SSD I would focus on why your machine feels slower than it did when you bought it. It should be just as fast as the day you bought it. This is what I would do...

1. Reboot the machine (to get a fresh start).

2. How full is your hard drive? A drive that is 90% full or more can cause things to slow down as running programs try to fit data into the empty spots on the disk.

3. Your screenshots (as ggstudio pointed out) do not show anything unusual and I don't think the number of page outs compared to the number of page ins you have are excessive.

4. You do seem to have a lot of processes listed even if they aren't using any cpu time the OS does have to keep track of them and allocate resources for them. That is my main reason for asking you to reboot your machine. Clean out some of those processes that have probably not been used for a while.

5. You said you use your machine at school. Do you run any cpu or memory intensive programs for school?

6. Battery life. Install a free program call coconut battery, run it. It will tell you the health of your battery and how many cycles it has on it. Also how much amp hours it can put out compared to what it could put out when new.