Q: mid 2012 macbook pro running slow

Hi.

Try restarting your Mac.

Try Safe Boot:

- 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

- After your Mac boots up, restart it as you usually do.

If this doesn't help, follow the instructions below:

- 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

Apart from that, take a look at this Apple article and follow the instructions on Resetting NVRAM shown there: How to Reset NVRAM on your Mac - Apple Support

Try resetting the System Management Controller: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295

I'd also suggest upgrading your RAM.

Hope this helps!

You're running low on RAM. Restarting more than once per month can help, just as buying more RAM and/or a SSD.

BTW: also remove those pesky remainders of CleanMyMac of your Mac.

System Software: ⓘ

    OS X Yosemite 10.10.2 (14C109) - Time since boot: about 31 days

Simply restarting your system once a week or so will also make a big difference; a restart flushes some caches and temp files. 31 days is a long time.

Another point. Those EC flags of insufficient RAM often go away when you get rid of useless scamware like CleanMyMac. My son has the identical computer as yours also with 4GB RAM AND El Capitan 10.11, and is using it for his engineering studies with zero RAM starvation issues. The difference? No cr@pware installed.

I'm not saying don't buy RAM. Extra RAM is never hurts, is relatively cheap right now and, for your model, can be upgraded at home in under 15 minutes. I only want you to understand that reports of RAM starvation can be related to bad software and overdue restarting. Were you facing true RAM starvation, the value of "Swaps Used" near the end of the report would be much higher than the 73MB your report shows--a mere trifle.

1. Update OS X. To learn how to do that please read How to update OS X and Mac apps - Apple Support. The version installed at present is well over a year old.
2. Consider updating to the latest OS X version. To learn how to do that please read Learn how to upgrade to the latest version of OS X.
3. Unless you have a backup, you will lose all your Mac's contents... eventually. Consider using Time Machine. To learn how to do that please read Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac - Apple Support.
4. Mac "cleaning" apps are all scams that will result in performance degradation, accelerating hardware failure, lost data, time, money, or all of the above. Do not use such things. Recovering from the effects of having used them often requires completely erasing the affected Mac and reconfiguring it from a backup. Excerpted from Effective defenses against malware and other threats:

• Never install any product that claims to "clean up", "speed up", "optimize", "boost" or "accelerate" your Mac; to "wash" it, "tune" it, or to make it "shiny". Those claims are absurd.
  • Such products are very aggressively marketed. They are all scams.
  • They generally operate on the flawed premise that a Mac accumulates "junk" that needs to be routinely "cleaned out" for optimum performance.
  • Trial versions of those programs are successful because they provide the instant gratification of greater free disk space.
  • That increased space is the result of irreversible destruction of files, programs, or operating system components normally protected from inadvertent alteration or deletion. The eventual result will be unreliable operation, poor performance and random crashes that may not become evident for months or even years after their use, when updates to programs or OS X are eventually released.
  • Memory "cleaners" that circumvent OS X's memory management algorithms work by purging inactive memory contents to mass storage, which can only result in degraded performance and accelerated hardware failure.

Do an SSD and Ram upgrade I did and now My Macbook performs great !....

Only costs as little as $89

Cucial Memory ( 16gb. kit @ $50)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008LTBJFW?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_deta ilpage_o03_s00

SSD ( OCZ Trion 240gb.  @ $39 )

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820228141&cm_re=ocz_trion_ 150-_-20-228-141-_-Product

Watch these videos

My video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qDvPJV11Yk

Other:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDWZLPoq__4

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.