My MacBook Pro is running very slow is there anything I can do to improve the performance?

Kappy's Personal Suggestions About OS X Maintenance

For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utility is: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption. Drive Genius provides additional tools not found in Disk Warrior for defragmentation of older drives, disk repair, disk scans, formatting, partitioning, disk copy, and benchmarking.

Four outstanding sources of information on Mac maintenance are:

1. OS X Maintenance - MacAttorney.

2. Mac maintenance Quick Assist

3. Maintaining Mac OS X

4. Mac Maintenance Guide

Periodic Maintenance

OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) See Mac OS X- About background maintenance tasks. If you are running Leopard or later these tasks are run automatically, so there is no need to use any third-party software to force running these tasks.

If you are using a pre-Leopard version of OS X, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts was significantly reduced after Tiger. (These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard, Lion, or Mountain Lion and should not be installed.)

Defragmentation

OS X automatically defragments files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive except when trying to install Boot Camp on a fragmented drive. But you don't need to buy third-party software. All you need is a spare external hard drive and Carbon Copy Cloner.

Cheap and Easy Defragmentation

You will have to backup your OS X partition to an external drive, boot from the external drive, use Disk Utility to repartition and reformat your hard drive back to a single volume, then restore your backup to the internal hard drive. You will use Carbon Copy Cloner to create the backup and to restore it.

1. Get an empty external hard drive and clone your internal drive to the

external one.

2. Boot from the external hard drive.

3. Erase the internal hard drive.

4. Restore the external clone to the internal hard drive.

Clone the internal drive to the external drive

1. Open Carbon Copy Cloner.

2. Select the Source volume from the left side dropdown menu.

3. Select the Destination volume from the left side dropdown menu.

4. Be sure the Block Copy button is not depressed or is ghosted.

5. Click on the Clone button.

Destination means the external backup drive. Source means the internal startup drive.

Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager appears. Select the icon for the external drive and click on the upward pointing arrow button.

After startup do the following:

Erase internal hard drive

1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.

2. After DU loads select your internal hard drive (this is the entry with the

mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the

drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is

failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be

reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the

DU main window.

3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the

drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended

(Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to

GUID then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait

until the process has completed.

Restore the clone to the internal hard drive

1. Open Carbon Copy Cloner.

2. Select the Source volume from the left side dropdown menu.

3. Select the Destination volume from the left side dropdown menu.

4. Be sure the Block Copy button is not selected or is ghosted.

5. Click on the Clone button.

Destination means the internal hard drive. Source means the external startup drive.

Note that the Source and Destination drives are swapped for this last procedure.

Malware Protection

As for malware protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. Starting with Lion Apple has included built-in malware protection that is automatically updated as necessary.

Helpful Links Regarding Malware Protection:

1. Mac Malware Guide.

2. Detecting and avoiding malware and spyware

3. Macintosh Virus Guide

For general anti-virus protection I recommend only using ClamXav, but it is not necessary if you are keeping your computer's operating system software up to date. You should avoid any other third-party software advertised as providing anti-malware/virus protection. They are not required and could cause the performance of your computer to drop.

Cache Clearing

I recommend downloading a utility such as TinkerTool System, OnyX 2.4.3, Mountain Lion Cache Cleaner 7.0.9, Maintenance 1.6.8, or Cocktail 5.1.1 that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old log files and archives, clearing caches, etc. Corrupted cache files can cause slowness, kernel panics, and other issues. Although this is not a frequent nor a recurring problem, when it does happen there are tools such as those above to fix the problem.

If you are using Snow Leopard or earlier, then for emergency cleaning install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the command line. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard. AppleJack 1.6 is compatible with Snow Leopard. (AppleJack works with Snow Leopard or earlier.)

Installing System Updates or Upgrades

When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand.

Backup and Restore

Having a backup and restore strategy is one of the most important things you can do to maintain your computer. Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):

1. Carbon Copy Cloner.

2. Deja Vu

3. SuperDuper!

4. Synk Pro

5. Tri-Backup

Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance and backup and restore.

Always have a current backup before performing any system updates or upgrades.

Be sure you have an adequate amount of RAM installed for the number of applications you run concurrently. Be sure you leave a minimum of 10% of the hard drive's capacity or 20 GBs, whichever is greater, as free space. Avoid installing utilities that rely on Haxies, SIMBL, or that alter the OS appearance, add features you will rarely if ever need, etc. The more extras you install the greater the probability of having problems. If you install software be sure you know how to uninstall it. Avoid installing multiple new software at the same time. Install one at a time and use it for a while to be sure it's compatible.

Additional suggestions will be found in:

1. Mac OS X speed FAQ

2. Speeding up Macs

3. Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance

4. Essential Mac Maintenance: Get set up

5. Essential Mac Maintenance: Rev up your routines

6. Five Mac maintenance myths

7. How to Speed up Macs

8. Myths of required versus not required maintenance for Mac OS X

Referenced software can be found at CNet Downloads or MacUpdate.

Add more RAM or run fewer applications concurrently.

This is a very general question since there are thousands of things you can do to improve the performance of your machine.

So maybe you can help me out with more details concerning what's going on?

When you say 'improve,' do you think you could tell me a little more about how you think your system should be functioning? What kinds of issues do you run into? Data storage problems? Games?

Requested Information:

• The year your computer was made and its dimensional specs.
• Type of storage on-board (Spinning-Disk HDD or SSD [solid state: apple-standard or third-party upgrade?])
• Are you getting the spinning globe of death?
• Is your fan super loud?
• How much RAM do you have? And if you have atleast 2GB of RAM, have you thought about upgrading to OS 10.7.x?
• What is your 'user' experience? This is not meant to be a judgement whatsoever, only something to help formulate a better answer: do you do a lot of clicking or do you use keyboard shortcuts for most operations?
• Are you running any special configurations like RAID or VirtualBox software?
• If you don't burn a lot of DVD's or CD's, have you ever thought about removing the DVD/CD drive and installing another hard drive? This last question would inevitably lead me to talk about a lot of other things above 😀
  Feel free to get back to me. I'll be online for most of the day.

Learn how it works and identify what can cause it to be slow.

Why is my computer slow?

Replace the hard drive with an SSD. Install as much memory as your model can accept.

Hey I know this post is super old but I was hoping you could hep me out. I have a 2011, 60watt macbook pro 13''. I dont download much software onto it besides some Adobe trials and a game. Mostly used for school work. The screen is cracked but I was hoping that didn't do any damage to the actual performance but it is running slowing (mostly the rainbow wheel of death spinning longer that I would like it to and it just doesn't run fast and smooth anymore like a mac should. Is it just old or is there something I can do to update it. I am no longer covered by applecare

aurylin wrote:

Hey I know this post is super old

And even more important is that only a few of the people who contributed here will ever read it. If you tried all the suggestions here and the situation didn't improve, then you will get a lot more help, a lot faster if you will start a new discussion. Provide us with a lot more information about your situation and it would probably be a good idea to download and run the EtreCheck software to give folks some idea of what your situation is. Otherwise we'd just be guessing.