Pinwheeling on a MBP 2012, pre-Retina

[loopdokter]

I've got a 13' MBP 2012 pre-Retina running Yosemite with all of the latest updates that I'm about to put a sledge hammer through due to how much pinwheeli...ing I'm seei...ng. I upgraded it from Mavericks and I'm really regretti.....ng the move. It's pinwheels on a wh...im. Sorry, it's havi...ng yet another moment of beachball madness.

There appears to be no rhyme or reason to it happening. I have noticed that sometimes when using Firefox I get a lot of script errors that bizarrely seems to stop the entire system and send it into rainbow frenzy of non-productivity. This is worse than Windows hourglassing. At least with those I'm generally able to open other apps and proceed. With this I'm just stuck wanting to put my fist through the screen while my Mac seems to want to declare it's LGBT friendly every minute.

I have 4 GB RAM that hopefully will be upgraded to 16 GB by the time Santa squishes through my non-existent chimney, but considering I use Logic to produce music and it barely shrugs while sending huge amounts of things through the CPU and RAM, I suspect this isn't the cause. HELP!

I should state that I'm technical and work in IT, but am largely 'new' to the Mac way of thinking, so I'm all ears for suggestions. I've scanned for adware and came up blank. Ccleaner doesn't report that there's much to clean and my start up doesn't have much that boots upon start. I've read a decent amount on the Internets and ran 'sudo update_dyld_shared_cache -force' to clean up the DYLD cache, but that only seems to have improved things a bit.

This machine is far too nice to end up with a sledgehammer bowtie.

 

[Fishrrman]

Important question:
What kind of drive is inside the MBP?

Is it a platter-based HDD (hard disk drive)?
Or, is it an SSD (solid state drive)?

Both Mavericks and Yosemite can run painfully slowly on computers with HDD's.
Put an SSD into it, and it should make a world of difference.

Swapping drives on a non-retina MBP is -very- easy to do, but...
... BE SURE you have THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE JOB.
See ifixit.com for a detailed guide on what you need and what to do.
The hardest part of the job is taking out and replacing the screws that hold the back plate on.

The "sweet spot" in SSD's right now is in the 240gb range.
If you need more space, $200+/- for 480-512gb is reasonable.

My prediction is that adding RAM may help "a little", but "not much".
It's changing the drive that will make the difference.

 

[loopdokter]

Important question:
What kind of drive is inside the MBP?

Is it a platter-based HDD (hard disk drive)?
Or, is it an SSD (solid state drive)?

Like I said, I'm tech-savvy so I know the difference but I appreciate the simplification. I'm pretty sure I've got the tools required.

I've yet to open it up but I suspect it's an SSD due to the company that I got it from working exclusively in SSDs and it being pretty lightweight. I've got an SSD I can throw in it kicking around but I don't know the size offhand. I'm going to replace the battery on it as well because that only lasts about two hours and change - which seems awfully low.

I should also note the computer doesn't often come out of sleep properly and I have to hold down the power button to bring it back to life. It will often freeze after trying to escape a screensaver and is very sluggish after it manages to come back to the desktop from the screensaver - if it doesn't crash before that. It's also started to randomly reboot and I get an error screen stating that 'there has been an error and OSX has rebooted to solve the problem' when it boots back up. The machine appears to get pretty hot at points.

I'm seriously considering flattening the machine and installing Yosemite on it clean instead of the upgrade I did from Mavericks like before, but not before I clone the drive.

 

[loopdokter]

A move from 4 GB of RAM to 16 GB seems to have rectified most of the pinwheeling issues.

Next step is upgrading the battery and the hard drive. It's just a standard hard drive.

 

[yjchua95]

A move from 4 GB of RAM to 16 GB seems to have rectified most of the pinwheeling issues.

Next step is upgrading the battery and the hard drive. It's just a standard hard drive.

Standard hard drive.

Found your problem