Macbook pro, beach ball of death

Darksol360,

I don't see a thing in your third-party software that could be causing any sluggishness. I have the same model as you do - but I have 16GB of RAM and a 960GB SSD which makes things a bit snappier.

The only thing that I could suggest is that your hard drive might be the culprit - if it's just marginally working, almost ready to die, that could certainly slow things up.

Boot into your Recovery partition (hold down the command and R keys whilst booting) and, once at the Recovery screen, open Disk Utility, select your drive on the left panel, and click the verify button. If everthing checks out OK, then you've some other problem. If you get red text saying that your drive needs repair, click on the Repair button and hope that DU can fix anything amiss.

Good luck,

Clinton

Thanks for the rapid response!

I verified the disk when I first looked at it before purchasing. It checked out A-okay, thats why I picked it up, but when I got it home it felt slower than what I thought for a three year old Mac that pnly a little old lady used. She was a photographer and had a lot of software installed by her company. I think I'm gona try a fresh Mavericks install, as the leftover apps, files, plist, etc in my own user profile makes me think it might be an issue with them. I am also going to be upgrading to 16GB in the coming week.

Would you recomend this route, if I just wanted to start over for a possible fresh snappy Mac? I have nothing to pertinent on it as I have owned it for less than a week.

Darksol360,

A clean install is always best - particularly on a 'new' machine. So, yes, that's the route that I would take.

Clinton

Awesome, thanks for the blessing ;) currently creating a USB Maverick install. It'll be fun to have a 'new' Mac. I'll report back. Especially after I throw in the 16gb of awesomeness!

Well... after a long process of creating a USB boot, and then install... WOW. this machine is SNAPPY! So excited. Immediate notice zero hang ups, and everything *ahem* just works like I anticipated.

Thanks for the advice clinton.

EasyFind is a game changer for finding the invisible files that can be identified by EtreCheck. Thank you for the suggestion.