MacBook Unusably Slow
Hi everyone. All of a sudden, my MacBook running Catalina has become incredibly slow.
After clicking on any element (buttons, menus, right-clicking), it takes literally minutes to get a reaction, only showing the beachball rolling. Opening any app takes very long (even Terminal or System Preferences). Opening a System Preference pane takes a few minutes. In Finder, switching directories or right-clicking takes minutes to respond. Clicking on the Apple in the menu also becomes unresponsive. As well as clicking on any menu, waiting for the menu to open takes 1-2 minutes. In Terminal, completing file name takes forever, or even a straight-up "ls".
So you get the idea, I have to wait a few minutes after every single input from the mouse or the keyboard, which makes the Mac unusable and is even making it very hard to backup the information.
My MacBook is old (2013), but was running decently until a couple of days ago. It has a 2.2 GB Intel 5 QuadCore, 8 GB of memory and 450 GB of free disk space.
I have checked using the Activity Monitor, and the CPU is hardly busy (95% idle), and there is plenty of memory left, as I only have the Finder and the System Preferences open.
I have booted in Safe Mode, but it is still the same. Another symptom is that some System Preferences return an error code "Preferences Error: Could not load Security and Privacy pane", and some system dropdowns show empty or with a "?" symbol in them.
Thank you very much for any help!
MacBook Pro