Hi, I have a base 2012 MacBook Pro 13" with 2.5 GHz running Mountain Lion 10.8.3. Recently my computer has been running pretty slow, so I did a clean up of my hard drive. I have a 500 GB hard drive and I only had about 150GB free, so i decided to move a lot of my stuff onto my external hard drive. Now I use about 180GB and still have 315GB free. I have 4 GB of RAM. I have been noticing that it is starting to get slow. Applications start very slowly, applications do not respond. Even typing sometimes, I finish typing and then my computer lags a bit and then spits out all the words that I've typed. Anyone know what I can do to improve speeds? I don't really run heavy intensive RAM apps, at most, i only run safari, powerpoint, garageband, and/or iPhoto, and rarely together, and my activity monitor shows that i am leave AT LEAST 45 percent of the CPU idle. Usually it stays around 85-90. I am still confused as to why my computer acts like this.
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Slow performance on MBP
- Thread starter lilfilboi123
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Restart your computer, and monitor memory usage during a normal work day and see if you get a lot of page outs or if your free RAM is getting quite low.
I'm suspecting either your hard drive is starting to go bad, or you're running out of RAM.
I've gone through the performance tips recently. Although, looking at the Activity Monitor, i see 5 GB of page outs, though I haven't restarted my computer for a while, since I usually leave it plugged in and just close the lid and put it to sleep. Is this bad? Should i shut down my computer overnight more often? I will check the activity monitor when i restart my computer when I get home. Most likely I will need to get more RAM right?
Although a potential solution, that's not really an answer to the problem. A MacBook Pro ($1500+ most likely) should not run like a dog after a few months.
I would suggest re-installing OS X from fresh, and re-installing your apps again too. It's a lengthy process, but it should help. If you have the money for a SSD, I would strongly recommend it.
8GB of RAM is overkill for what you say you use your MBP for. "Add more RAM" is often something suggested to people by those who don't understand it. My '09 MBP has been on for several days now, and still has 746mb free RAM (not inactive, free). Free RAM is wasted RAM.
To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.
Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used