Q: Can anyone tell me why my macbook is running slow?

Try restarting your Mac in Safe mode:

- Shut down your Mac

- Wait until your computer turns off and after that press the Power button

- Right after you hear the startup tone, press and hold the Shift key

- Release the Shift key when you see a grey Apple sign and the progress bar below this sign

- Once you see Desktop, start a Disk Utility scan to detect and repair file system errors (don't forget to choose your main hard drive)

- Click on Verify Disk and then, if asked to fix problems, on Repair Disk

- After this, click on Verify Disk Permissions and then on Repair Disk Permissions

- After the process is finished, shut down your Mac and turn it back on after about 30 seconds

Hope this helps!

Download and post an Etrecheck report:

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Ciao.

When you see a beachball cursor or the slowness is especially bad, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.  

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.

Launch the Console application in any one of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.

The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select

          SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages

from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

          View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.

Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.

Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.

The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.

Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.

Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

When you post the log extract, you might see an error message on the web page: "You have included content in your post that is not permitted," or "The message contains invalid characters." That's a bug in the forum software. Please post the text on Pastebin, then post a link here to the page you created.

If you have an account on Pastebin, please don't select Private from the Paste Exposure menu on the page, because then no one but you will be able to see it.

Delete the Torrent application. it is a wonderful way of introducing malware into your computer.

Quit Google Chrome and all its components and use another browser.  See if there is any improvement in performance.

Is the installed 8 GB RAM original?  If not, install the original RAM and see if there is an improvement.

If none of the above helps, run an Apple Hardware test:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257

Note that an error free AHT is not conclusive.

If the AHT results in no errors, follow the process posted by Linc Davis.

Ciao.