Beach ball and Etree Report

—Yes, the report shows your hard drive, which was glacially slow when new, is now running at 1/2 of "glacial" and has health issues as well.

—MacKreeper, not one of Russia's most stellar exports, is apparently coded to be horribly difficult to fully uninstall. Normally I don't like third-party removal tools, but your case warrants outside software help.

It appears that the trial version of MalwareBytes, a development of a long-serving contributor to these forums, can identify MacKreeper as "potentially unwanted program" or "PUP" and remove it fully. Get MalwareBytes ONLY from the developer's site to avoid other dreck like MacKreeper:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/mac

Info from MalwareBytes' blog pages:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/detections/pup-mackeeper

Also this list of articles about the same intruder:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/search/mackeeper

⚠️ You DO NOT want to migrate anything from your old computer to a new computer while MacKreeper is present.

—High CPU use.

Diagnostics Information (past 60 days):

    2024-12-29 16:38:47 photoanalysisd - High CPU Use (6 times)

That is a common issue and can be a real drag on performance. Fortunately, it is a fix-yourself issue. This thread from another forums discusses how:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/310594/what-is-photoanalysisd-and-why-is-it-using-77-of-my-cpu

That will not speed up your hard drive but may take off some of the load.

• Remove MacKeeper using the uninstaller they provide.
• Hard Drive appears to be failing as your Read/Write speeds are dismal. MacKeeper can cause poor performance, but the problem you are having is likely the result of your Hard Drive.

I agree that any money spent should be towards a newer computer. Not only will you see performance improvement from increased processor speed, but also the drives are now SSD instead of the older mechanical drives and are much more reliable and faster.

I would recommend having a Time Machine backup.

If you are using iCloud Photos to sync your photos to iCloud, then those will appear on your new computer. Also if you are syncing the Documents & Desktop Folder to iCloud, then those will also be available. It would most likely require you to be using a purchased iCloud plan as the data would most likely not fit in the free 5GB portion. There is not an option to have an iCloud backup for the Mac like there is on the iPhone, but some of the data can be stored there that would be available on your new computer using the same Apple ID.

Use iCloud Drive to store documents on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad - Apple Support

Use iCloud Photos to store photos in iCloud - Apple Support

When setting up the new Mac, you use Migration Assistant to transfer the data from your old Mac and one of the options is by copying the data directly from the old Mac either using WiFi or a direct connection.

Transfer to a new Mac with Migration Assistant - Apple Support

There are pros and cons in using any of the methods to transfer you data. In some cases it is best to set up the Mac as a new device and use your same Apple ID for your iCloud data. This prevents transferring old applications and system extensions that are likely outdated from transferring over to the new computer. You would need to then manually install any Applications that you still want on your new computer. The Time Machine backup gives you that secondary backup of your data in case something goes wrong with the other methods, so that is why I would recommend to have that just in case.

Docjaffery999 wrote:

I had this connected to iCloud. Do I need to do a time machine either external drive so I can swap all documents and photos to new iMac or would it come if I use same user ids imported from iCloud ? Please forgive my ignorance

Backups are the only way to mark data as being important.

iCloud doesn't do backups for Mac. It can provide desktop and documents sync, if configured for that. It can also sync app corruptions, can sync mistaken deletions, and other issues, too.

If your data is important to you, I’d acquire an external hard disk drive, and set up Time Machine:

• Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support

The hard disk should be minimally two or three times the storage capacity you plan to configure for your new Mac.

The macOS migration can be direct, or can use a cloned copy of the storage, or can use a Time Machine backup.

• Transfer to a new Mac with Migration Assistant - Apple Support
• Restore your Mac from a backup - Apple Support