Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

MBPro 15" late 2011 too damn slow

Giuanniello

Giuanniello

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 21, 2012
789
216
Capri - Italy
Ok, I know, it's not a brand new sparkling fast one but, still, 2.2Ghz quad core i7 and 16GB memory, yes, slow old tech 500GB hard drive (waiting for 1TB SSD to drop a little more and then switch), it takes ages to load applications, not much starts at the login but, still, it is unbelievable slow, compared to the poor 11" MBAir 2012 with a mere 128HD SSD and 4GB RAM it seems a turtle, I checked with activity monitor and there is nothing sucking computing power, loads of RAM available, I did start in recovery mode and used the (wow!) updated Disk Utility to check the hard drive and it all seems to be fine, what the h*ll can I do to speed it up a bit whilst I can switch to solid state drive? Oh, by the way, over 70GB of free space available to swap just in case, OS is at its latest iteration and also checked the library folder for startup items but there is nothing sucking either cpu power or memory, I am quite disheartened...

Help please!!!
 
Your original hard drive's nearing 5 years old. My guess is that it's dying. They tend to slow everything to a crawl before croaking when they don't simply catastrophically fail. Keep a good backup handy.
 
HDD is the cause. Loading and launching time can be reduced to almost none with a fast SSD. Quad core sandy bridge is still a quite powerful processor. HD3000 is old and a lot less powerful than current iris pro, but it can drive low resolution screen pretty well. Get yourself a ssd and I am sure you will fall in love with your mbp again.
 
The hard drive was definitely my problem, as you can read about in this thread. Disk Utility didn't give me any indication that the old drive was dying, so if your RAM is fine then it's more than likely your HD. But by all means, I second the motion for you to get a solid-state drive.
 
Its all your HDD. People are su used to SSD's these days they forget just how much of an improvement they really were.
 
snaky69 said:
Your original hard drive's nearing 5 years old. My guess is that it's dying. They tend to slow everything to a crawl before croaking when they don't simply catastrophically fail. Keep a good backup handy.
Click to expand...
This. I've seen it happen time and time again. My suggestion is to get a good backup ASAP, and pull the trigger on the SSD.
 
Starting from Mavericks, the OS favours SSDs. That may be another contributing factor to the slow and dying HDD. 1TB SSDs are going for $200 recently -- I think it won't drop much farther in the very near future. Go ahead and get one. :)
 
At least here in Italy for a 1TB SSD it still takes just a little less than 300, they dropped almost 10% since xmas, I have other priorities now and have to still wait, maybe in the meantime another little drop and I'll pull for a 1TB so I have no storage problems and can squeeze again the power out of the old machine.

Thank you
 
Step back from Yosemite & El Capitan, OS X is now so poorly optimised that a fast SSD is a necessity, in comparison Windows 10 flies, even on very low level hardware. Reverting to Mavericks will restore the lost performance. If you want to remain on 10.11, an SSD is the only realistic solution.

Q-6
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back