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Sluggish 2011 MBP, help needed

D

DreamLand

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 10, 2009
56
0
Hi everyone,

Last week my colleague broke my MBA LCD. I sold my MBA and I bought an early 2011 MBP 15" (2.2GHz, 4GB ram, 750GB HDD & AMD 6750 with 1GB). I paid $1500 and I don't know if that is a reasonable price. By the way, it is still covered by Apple warranty.

I'm noticing sluggishness and slow response, and I was not expecting this from this laptop. For example, opening Reeder app could take up to 1:40 min and MS Word could take 23 seconds. I thought that MBP will be faster than my previous laptop (2010 11" MBA). I know SSD speed up the system, but I am not sure if this low performance is related to HDD. What do you think?

I ordered a Crucial M4 and 8GB ram, and I hope that it'll fix this. I can cancel this order if you think my problem is related to my hardware/software.
 
For me, the 8gb on my system really improved the performance. Also when my computer slows down, i tend to use Onyx. It's really good for cleaning up and making the computer that much faster.
 
I think it was the non-SSD hard drive that probably made your MBP feel slow compared to the MBA. Putting in a Crucial M4 will make the MBP feel much faster, as it did in my 2011 15" MBP.

If you need to know, you could add the SSD while keeping the stock 4GB of RAM to see whether that is where the performance was lost.
 
Update

Thanks GGJstudios. I saw your post before I created this thread. I usually apply most of your suggestion. CPU and memory usage seems normal.

Thanks xdbuix for your suggestion. I tried Onyx. It solved my issue partially. What I mean by that is when I restart my computer, apps open fast as expected. For example, Reeder app takes less than 2 seconds, and Word takes less than 10 seconds. However, after a while my MBP becomes sluggish again. Even if there are no apps running, Word could take 2 minutes to open.

Hi hakuin. I'm not sure really if my issue is related to HDD. I don't expect for an app like Reeder or Word to take up to 2 minutes to lunch. I used to have 2007 MBP, and I think it was much faster than this one.
 
Another observation: You might have a fragmented hard drive. Drive Genius can defrag it for you, but unfortunately it's $$ and I don't know of any free apps out there that will defrag.
 
When I bought it, I formatted the HDD and did clean install of Lion. I then migrated my data from a Time Machine backup. Any idea what is happening to my system?
 
DreamLand said:
Thanks xdbuix for your suggestion. I tried Onyx. It solved my issue partially. What I mean by that is when I restart my computer, apps open fast as expected. For example, Reeder app takes less than 2 seconds, and Word takes less than 10 seconds. However, after a while my MBP becomes sluggish again. Even if there are no apps running, Word could take 2 minutes to open.
Click to expand...

Have you check Activity Monitor? Are you getting a lot of page outs around the time of the slow down?

When I bought it, I formatted the HDD and did clean install of Lion. I then migrated my data from a Time Machine backup. Any idea what is happening to my system?
Click to expand...

IMHO, 4GB is not enough for Lion to run smoothly even under light to normal use.
 
ThunderSnake said:
Have you check Activity Monitor? Are you getting a lot of page outs around the time of the slow down?
Click to expand...
The OP indicated they had already gone through the performance tips, which includes checking Activity Monitor and page outs.
 
I'd get the hard drive checked for disk errors.

It sounds very slow, nothing on my MBP early 2011 takes that long to load (including ableton live, Vmware Fusion + copy of Windows 7, etc). Yes, it is slower to load than the MBA, but nowhere near that bad.

A couple of minutes to load sounds like disk/cable errors to me.
 
Thanks everybody. I restarted my MBP, and I kept observing my mac performance. As soon as it got sluggish I took a screen shot of the activity monitor. Please let me know if you see anything unusual.

Hi throAU. Do you know a free app that can test HDD for errors?
 

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Mac OS X is horrendous with the amount of RAM allocated to apps. I remember when 1 GB was enough with Leopard and not not even 4 GB will suffice for Lion.

Do upgrade your RAM as this is the only way to avoid the sluggishness and paging to the HDD.
 
DreamLand said:
Thanks everybody. I restarted my MBP, and I kept observing my mac performance. As soon as it got sluggish I took a screen shot of the activity monitor. Please let me know if you see anything unusual.
Click to expand...
There's nothing out of the ordinary there. Sorting by CPU usage is usually more helpful than sorting by real memory usage, when trying to find sources of slow performance.
DreamLand said:
Hi throAU. Do you know a free app that can test HDD for errors?
Click to expand...
You can use Disk Utility to verify and repair your disk.

Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
 
I'd also check the logs in Console.app

I'm not on my mac at the moment (at work), but I would wager that if your hard drive has for example, bus-reset errors, they should be listed in one of the log files, maybe the system log (look for lines with the word "reset" i n them?

If the drive is resetting itself for some reason half-way through a transfer, but (eventually) returning valid data to the OS, it may not show problems in disk utility.

If you're attempting to load something that is taking 1 minute plus, if you listen carefully, can you hear the drive "click" every couple of seconds or so (it might be too quiet, older drives it is a lot easier to hear)? The "click" is a different sound to normal disk activity... hard to describe but its more of a regular cyclical noise than the random burst time noise as disk activity reads from the drive...

the "click of death" is a pretty good sign that something in the drive is not happy, even if it is still "Working"
 
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