Slow running macbook pro

ajmoney

I was wondering if any of you lovely people could help me? In the last week or so my macbook pro has been running VERY slowly and buffers (spinning rainbow colored wheel) every couple of minutes. I added some CDs into the music folder of my itunes account last week and assumed it must have been that making it run slowly. Last night I moved them all onto my external hard drive but it still hasn't helped. Can anyone suggest what I can do to find out why it is running slowly or what I can do to speed it up again? Please bare with me as I am not very technically minded so may need some help understanding where to find things!

Thanks in advance.

almillar

Hopefully you've got a 'Macintosh HD' on your desktop. Right click it and click 'get info' and it should tell you the size of the drive, and the space available - are you running out of disk space?
General - what Macbook Pro is it, how much RAM does it have?
Click the apple logo at top left, and 'About this Mac'

ajmoney

Hi, thanks for your reply. My mac is version 10.7.5. The size of the drive is 500GB and I have 434.63 free, I have 4GB of RAM.

almillar

OK RAM and hard drive space sounds good. Is there any reason you're still on 10.7 as opposed to 10.10 - you're missing out on stacks of updates, but maybe your hardware isn't up to it. You've quoted me your OS version, not your Mac version, so I still don't know what your hardware is.
Unless you've a reason not to, I'd set about backing up all your data (you should already do this!) and getting the OS upgraded. If you've got the app store on your mac you should be able to upgrade to 10.8, 10.9 then 10.10. It would be beneficial to do a fresh install of 10.8, then the rest, THEN restore your data and install apps.

ajmoney

Stupid question alert! Is it easy to do the upgrades? Is it easy to restore everything after the upgrade?
I think my Mac version is Mac OS X lion? If this sounds stupid then please point me in the right direction.

TadleyBaggie

OSX upgrades are fairly painless, I've never had to restore anything afterwards.

securityguy

Any laptop Mac which can support 4GB of RAM will run 10.10 Yosemite, I think (indeed, almost every Mac that can support 4GB of RAM will run 10.10, with the exception of some pre-2009 Mac Minis).

10.10 is in general faster than 10.7, especially on machines with 4GB of RAM or more. People have a treat to come with 10.11 El Capitan, which appears to be much lighter on memory (I'm running the Beta releases on a 2012 Mini, a 2007 iMac and a 2011 Air, the latter two with only 4GB).

Updates are painless. Take a backup just in case (you're running Time Machine to an external disk periodically, yes?) but should "just work". I've done about fifteen OS upgrades over the last couple of months (lots of Betas, three machines) and haven't had a problem.

fishybusiness

Updates won't speed it up.

My experience with Macs is that swapping over from mechanical hard drive to SSD transforms them to a near new machine. Your symptoms remind me of every mac I have owned and extra memory/ SSD changed everything.

Currently have an iMac Core 3, was so slow even after reinstall, now it is so fast. Also have an old 2.5 GHz laptop same issue, SSD made all the difference.

You may not be in the market for a replacement drive, I'm just pointing out the troubles and advantages to consider

securityguy

*My experience with Macs is that swapping over from mechanical hard drive to SSD transforms them to a near new machine. Your symptoms remind me of every mac I have owned and extra memory/ SSD changed everything.*

Absolutely.

Moneymaker

ajmoney wrote: »

Can anyone suggest what I can do to find out why it is running slowly or what I can do to speed it up again?

You still haven't divulged WHAT APPLE MAC you have. Click on the apple icon (top left).
Select "About this Mac".
Click on "More Info..."
Now, does it state "PowerBook" or "iMac" or "MacBook" or "Mac Mini" or what?
How old is it?
If the internal Hard Drive is more than 5 years old then it's overdue replacement.

Here's some useful info. http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

ajmoney wrote: »

Please bare with me

I'll keep my clothes on if you don't mind! :cool:

ajmoney

Moneymaker wrote: »

You still haven't divulged WHAT APPLE MAC you have. Click on the apple icon (top left).
Select "About this Mac".
Click on "More Info..."
Now, does it state "PowerBook" or "iMac" or "MacBook" or "Mac Mini" or what?
How old is it?
If the internal Hard Drive is more than 5 years old then it's overdue replacement.

Here's some useful info. http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html


I'll keep my clothes on if you don't mind! :cool:

A MacBook pro, it was mentioned in the title so I thought you were asking something else! It is 3 and a half years old.

I am cheating a little and my step son is going to do the updates for me in return for food I am hoping to will be faster soon! I have saved all my personal stuff on a separate drive this morning in addition to the backed up versions.

Thanks for all the help.