Mid-2010 13" MacBook Pro frequently LAGS

[arjunj]

My Mid-2010 13" MacBook Pro running OS X 10.8.3 has recently started lagging intermittently to the point of almost freezing. It doesn't quite freeze, but lags so bad that it takes a good 8-10 seconds for the Mac to register even a simple click or swipe. I never do any CPU-intensive work, though I did use it for gaming quite a bit in the past on a Bootcamp partition that I've deleted long since. Now the lag shows up even when there's no app running other than Safari (Moom and Dropbox always run in the background). The only way to restore the Mac to normalcy then is to force-restart and even then it sometimes goes right back to lagging.
Has anyone else had such issues with lag? Could it have anything to do with a high operating temperature (around 50 degree celsius)? It does heat up quite a bit at times.

 

[UBS28]

- Check activity monitor for strange processes
- Upgrade to a SSD & 8 / 16 gb RAM for more performance

 

[maflynn]

Did you recently install anything?

Also in the activity monitor make sure you have it set to all processes and you're sorting by CPU

 

[arjunj]

But what would qualify as suspicious in activity monitor? I didn't recently install anything of importance - nothing that should cause the whole system to freeze up, at least. The last install was Spotify, I think.

 

[NewishMacGuy]

- Check activity monitor for strange processes
- Upgrade to a SSD & 8 / 16 gb RAM for more performance

Pay attention to point 2 above.

How long ago did you update to ML?

I have noticed that with every update past the last version of Lion, OSX plays less and less well with our older C2D machine with only 4GB RAM and a 5400rpm HDD. It's gotten to the point where it's almost unusable. I'm either going to upgrade the hardware as noted in the quote, or downgrade the OS.


___

 

[Flyin Ryan]

My Mid-2010 13" MacBook Pro running OS X 10.8.3 has recently started lagging intermittently to the point of almost freezing. It doesn't quite freeze, but lags so bad that it takes a good 8-10 seconds for the Mac to register even a simple click or swipe. I never do any CPU-intensive work, though I did use it for gaming quite a bit in the past on a Bootcamp partition that I've deleted long since. Now the lag shows up even when there's no app running other than Safari (Moom and Dropbox always run in the background). The only way to restore the Mac to normalcy then is to force-restart and even then it sometimes goes right back to lagging.
Has anyone else had such issues with lag? Could it have anything to do with a high operating temperature (around 50 degree celsius)? It does heat up quite a bit at times.

I've had this same thing happen to my old PowerBook g4 12" and my wife's white MacBook. Both times it was a failing hard drive. A new HD did the trick, was like new afterwards. They're actually really easy to install on your model, I have the same one now. There's a walk through from ifixit on YouTube.

 

[NewishMacGuy]

I've had this same thing happen to my old PowerBook g4 12" and my wife's white MacBook. Both times it was a failing hard drive. A new HD did the trick, was like new afterwards. They're actually really easy to install on your model, I have the same one now. There's a walk through from ifixit on YouTube.

This is also a good point! And happened to me about 18 months or so ago with my old white MacBook.

If you don't already have a backup make one now - BUT don't do a whole disk backup. Get your most important files copied first in order of importance. Once that's done you can try a whole disk backup. Then swap out the drive.

If you're good with 256GB or fewer I would get an SSD, but if you need 500GB or more I would look into a hybrid. Spending $300-$400 on a 2010 uMBP-13 doesn't make a lot of sense to me. A good hybrid will run well less than half of that and give you a significant speed boost. Given the fact that you're running Sata II in that laptop, you won't be able to use about half the speed of a modern large SSD anyway.


___