Q: Mavericks slowed down my MacBook Pro 13 inch (Mid 2010)

How much RAM is installed in your computer? Also your system may be re-indexing Spotlight. To be sure open Spotlight (Command Spacebar) and see if it's reindexing.

Open Activity Monitor and look to see if any applications or processes are taking up large amounts of system resources.

Do you have Intego VirusBarrier installed? If yes, just disable real time scan and let us know.

I have the same problem.  I have 4gb of RAM; I was going to upgarde to 8, but seeing that you have 8, this probably won't help.

I feel like it's progressivly getting slower as well.

I was going to get a solid state drive and more RAM to fix the issue.

Looking at my activity monitor I show this:

As it sits right now, I have just Chrome open, facebook tab, email tab and this thread tab open and it's using 3.99 of my memory.  Kernal_task is using the most memory.

I dont want to buy a new computer but maybe it's just too old?

Any info would be great.  I'm not terribly technical and I love my mac, makes me sad to think of getting rid of it!  Altho excited for a new one

Identical problem. Mac Book Pro 2010. Few apps running, nothing taht would give me any trouble before update to Mavericks. Now it is dragging its feet and shows 3.99GB memroy usage, most of it kernel.

I have a newer macmini. No problems there.

Is apple playing games with us to force us to buy new computers?

I literally just fixed my issue.  I went out and got an SSD and 8gb of memory. 

When we tried to xfer my hard drive over we were experiencing issues and come to find out, the hard drive was failing. 

I have the same problem...

I have 4gb of RAM; I was going to upgarde to 8, but seeing this I'm thinking to buy a windows 8 computer.

Hi everybody.  Same issue : macbook pro mid 2010.  750gb hybrid disk and 8gb RAM; After 7-10 days of operation, Maverick started to slow down , to a point it becomes hard to use the computer.   As it seems there is no solution to this, i'm planning to do a (long) fresh install of 10.8.  Hope ther are other ideas....

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Thanks for the thread. My boss has been getting crushed by this upgrade... I told him to give me a crack at it before he went to the genius bar.

I reset the SMC, which helped a little, and he noticed Word and PP opened a little faster, and then we discovered Office database was corrupted... i rebuilt it and .... it solved ALL the problems... its zippier than ever.

So if your a hardcore Office user, maye this will help.

I tried to parlay the fix into a free dinner, but he blew me off.

In addition to drives starting to fail there are lots of software incompatabilites that could cause slow performance.  See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5662294?tstart=0

If you perform a clean install on a disk be sure to write zeros to the entire disk as part of the erasure process.  That will find an map out bad blocks.  Do not do this on an SSD.

After exhausing the other software fixes I do recommend a clean install.  When I isntalled an SSD using cloning it sped up the boot time by 2X.  When I did a clean reinstalll it impoved the boot time by another 2.5x for a total of 5x.  So hardware upgrades and clean installs can make a big difference but they won't help as much if there is a lurking software incompatibiity.

Benjamin,

Apple did not force you to install Mavericks on your 2010 MacBook Pro, and they cannot force you to buy another one of their products.

If you are still having trouble with Mavericks on your  MacBook Pro, please install EtreCheck, run it, and open a new discussion here, copying the EtreCheck output to your first post so that people here can offer suggestions on what might be affecting your MacBook Pro’s performance.