Starting Fresh - Legacy MacBook Air

[Endorphine88]

My old Air (2011 11inch model) is painfully slow at times. What are suggestions for me to give it a fresh start (all my important files are backed up externally) so I can speed it up a bit. I notice that upgrading OS does the opposite since every new iteration is more and more demanding and the poor baby is about 8 years old at this point. It still works fine and I don't do much besides type and browse the internet on it, but those are no CPU-demanding tasks and a lot of times is struggles even with them.
I've also noticed that even though I barely have any files stored on it, the memory always fills up somehow and when I try to dig I can't find anything that would potentially be taking up so much space. Granted it's a tiny 128 GB drive, but I literally have nothing on the actual MacBook - just pages files.

 

[bensisko]

My old Air (2011 11inch model) is painfully slow at times. What are suggestions for me to give it a fresh start (all my important files are backed up externally) so I can speed it up a bit. I notice that upgrading OS does the opposite since every new iteration is more and more demanding and the poor baby is about 8 years old at this point. It still works fine and I don't do much besides type and browse the internet on it, but those are no CPU-demanding tasks and a lot of times is struggles even with them.
I've also noticed that even though I barely have any files stored on it, the memory always fills up somehow and when I try to dig I can't find anything that would potentially be taking up so much space. Granted it's a tiny 128 GB drive, but I literally have nothing on the actual MacBook - just pages files.

You could try rolling it back to the original OS it shipped with (within one or two versions) - since all you’re doing is typing and surfing, it should be sufficient. Where you’re probably getting into a jam is the ram (do you have 2 or 4?). I had a 2011 air 11” with 2 GB ram and it was utterly useless after a couple of os upgrades.

 

[Endorphine88]

It's the base model - 2gb ram. I just needed it for papers in college and it worked beautifully. I would have never upgraded IOS if I knew it would cripple it like that. How do I roll the IOS back? Is it simple?