Problems with lagging MBP, pinwheel

[bosco500]

I had a 2.4G MBP with 4G ram that I used for about a year. I bought an Intel 128GB SSD and used the optibay to install. I'm using the HD to store the home folder, and all applications and OSX on the SSD. The MBP started getting really laggy here lately, I see a pinwheel for about 60 seconds when I use "Save as" or try and print something. So I bought a 2.8G 17" MBP with 4G ram, hoping it was a hardware issue. I swapped both drives into the new MBP, but am having the same issues.

I use a lot of different softwares (office '08, xcode, parallels, quickbooks, etc...) so its hard to pinpoint it down to a specific application. I am going to wipe the MBP clean and start over, but what is the best route? Should I just backup the home folder, reinstall all software then put back the home folder? I want to avoid copying the problem, but can't afford to lose all of my application data.

Thanks for any advise!

 

[IgnatiusTheKing]

Maybe your SSD is the culprit?

 

[bosco500]

Maybe your SSD is the culprit?

Possibly. I guess I could try copying the home folder to the HD and disabling the SSD first and see if that corrects the problem. Thanks for the idea.

 

[spinnerlys]

Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities) and select Show All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example

 

[bosco500]

Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities) and select Show All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example

Tried that, nothing out of the ordinary. Even when the system slows down and the pinwheel appears. The two highest CPU percentages are prl_vm_app (~9%) and kernel_task (~8%)