I have a slow Macbook Pro
Hi guys,
I hope you all are doing well. I have a slow Mac, it is a 10.8.3, 2.5 Intel Core, 4GB. I bought this brand new from Apple. For the last year, this laptop has been slow to the point where I think it would be cheaper to move back to the PC and just buy a new PC every 2-3 years.
The problems I have are the following:
1. Web pages are loading up slow. The PC loads them faster on the same network.
- I have tried clearing the cache and ran Onyx as well. I used Safari and Chrome
- I also ran ClamXav and no high level virus pops up. My former boss did have a virus on his where when he would show up with his laptop at the office and the internet would slow down. Genius bar was no help, but our help desk found a virus that was killing our bandwidth. He downloaded a lot of movies from Bittorrent. So I was thinking I may have the same problme. But I am not sure if ClamVav is advanced enough to find these types of viruses. And Genius Bar could not find any problem.
2. Loading programs take a while, espcially with Word and Excel. The PC loads faster.
- I ran the disk utilies to verify disk and the permissions
- I even formatted the Hard Drive and reinstalled the software.
3. Sometimes when I play a embedded video, the whole screen turns black and would take 30 second or so for the screen to reappear and continue with the clip. This problem started today.
4. The hard disk clicks once in a while. Back when I was on the PC, this was a sign that the HD needs to be replaced
- I would run the utility to see if the hard disk was fine. About 5 months ago it said the disk was damaged. I have been rerunning once every two months since and so far that error has not reappeared.
I use this laptop just to check email and surf the web. I do not do any graphic design so do not know why these simple functions are a headache. I do watch movies as well on the laptop. I have run the Activity Monitor and nothing is really eating the the CPU and I have a decent amount of free HD space.
I did take the laptop to Apple and they said the laptop seemed sluggish and when they did an overnight test they could not find any problems. I have has the video board changed out a few times because sometimes when I would use Safari, the screen would have a "white snow screen" for a split second from I jump from the homepage to another website. This stopped when I upgraded to the recent OS.
Sometime the Apple tech would say that the corrupt video board would also affect the wireless connection thus the slow internet. But for this laptop, I think I changed the video board around 3 times, which is disappointing for a laptop that costs around $2,000 versus a $600 PC. I do use this laptop everday and carry it around each day until the PC laptops in the past. So it has been my workhorse for over 3+ years.
I really do not think I need more memory since my laptop use is not demanding. I may be that the hard drive needs to be changed out or some type of virus eating up my performance. If the hard drive, I was thinking of getting a SSD.
Any help would be appreciated.
MacBook Pro (15-inch 2.53 GHz), iOS 6.1.4
