New MacBook Pro with Slow Poor Performance

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Level 1

13 points

New MacBook Pro with Slow Poor Performance

I bought a new MBP (July 2018 15in) from the Apple refurb store a couple of months ago and I'm really disappointed with it's performance. I'd say my previous 2012 MBP performed on a par with this one, if not better!

The performance is underwhelming, it can be slow to respond and it hangs quite a bit showing the beach ball a great deal. The Wi-fi drops out frequently in numerous different locations, I have to turn it off/on) to be able to reconnect.

My Magic Mouse (1) disconnects every 15-20mins, sometimes it reconnects and other times I have to turn it off/on as well. (it's not the batteries BTW)

Safari is constantly saying ' The webpage is using significant memory, closing it may improve performance...'

The fan is constantly kicking in and the trackpad has periods when it doesn't respond.

I used Migration Assistant when moving across from my old MBP and wonder whether I should wipe this new one and reinstall everything manually to see if that improves performance?

Any help and suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

Mark

MacBook Pro 15", OS X 10.11

Posted on Jan 9, 2020 2:49 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

dwb

Level 7

32,920 points

Jan 10, 2020 4:15 AM in response to Mark Coop

It is possible a bad migration is causing the problem or some program you have installed. Two quick diagnostic tests you can perform are: 1) create a new user account and log into it. If there's something in your account - things like a dicey font, a mangled preference file, a startup unique to your account - the problem will disappear. Now you know where to start looking. 2) restart in Safe Mode (restart holding the shift key until the Apple icon appears). Among other things, safe mode loads a minimal set up drivers. If you've got something that affects the entire system - say a scanner driver for instance - since it didn't load the problem wouldn't exist. Again, you have some idea where to start looking.

One final diagnostic that AppleCare often asks us to do is to erase the drive and reinstall the operating system. If I've done the two things above and haven't gotten a clue (after backing up) I'll do that and not install any software. If the computer still doesn't behave then I'm pretty confident it is hardware and stop working on it myself. If this does solve it then I have the "fun" of trying to make an (educated) guess as to what it is.