Mid 2012 MacBook very slow

[shakey55]

when i plug a camera or something into my macbook pro via USB it becomes very slow and almost unusable.

Why ?

 

[DeltaMac]

You can open your Activity Monitor, and watch the CPU or Memory tabs when you insert the camera.
That may help you see what kind of processes start happening when you plug in your camera.
Does the same happen when you plug in a USB flash drive (thumb drive)?

 

[shakey55]

You can open your Activity Monitor, and watch the CPU or Memory tabs when you insert the camera.
That may help you see what kind of processes start happening when you plug in your camera.
Does the same happen when you plug in a USB flash drive (thumb drive)?

Yes. It seems send MacBook into a spin and takes forever to do any thing.

Once unplugged a different matter

 

[DeltaMac]

So it makes no difference what you plug in to USB, your MacBook just slows way down (and you probably see the cursor change to a spinning wheel?)

What does your Activity Monitor show? You should notice that a process takes off, maybe several processes.
If you have the listing sorted by CPU use, or in memory tab, by memory use, you should see pretty quickly which processes become active.

This will work best if you launch Activity Monitor first, before you plug anything into a USB port.

(Important questions here!)
1. How much memory (RAM) is installed in your MacBook?
2. How much free space is available on the hard drive?