Q: I think I might need to restore my 2010 Macbook Pro

Things You Can Do To Resolve Slow Downs

If your computer seems to be running slower here are some things you can do:

Start with visits to:  OS X Maintenance - MacAttorney;

                                  The X Lab: The X-FAQs;

                                  The Safe Mac » Mac Performance Guide;

                                  The Safe Mac » The myth of the dirty Mac;

                                  Mac maintenance Quick Assist.

Boot into Safe Mode then repair your hard drive and permissions:

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions Pre-Lion/Mountain Lion

Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list.  In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive.  If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.

If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.

Repair the Hard Drive - Lion/Mountain Lion

Boot from your Lion Recovery HD. When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list.  In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive.  If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported, then click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu. Select Restart from the Apple menu.

Boot to the Recovery HD:

Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Restart your computer normally and see if this has helped any. Next do some maintenance:

Suggestions for OS X Maintenance

For situations Disk Utility 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; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible.

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.) If this isn't the case, 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 since Tiger.  These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard or Lion and should not be installed.

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. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems. For more about malware see Macintosh Virus Guide.

I would also recommend downloading a utility such as TinkerTool System, OnyX 2.4.3, or Cocktail 5.1.1 that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old log files and archives, clearing caches, etc.

For emergency repairs 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. There is no confirmation that this version also works with Lion.

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

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. Data Backup

     3. Deja Vu

     4. SuperDuper!

     5. SyncTwoFolders

     6. Synk Pro

     7. Synk Standard

     8. Tri-Backup

Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.

Referenced software can be found at CNet Downloads or MacUpdate.

Additional Hints

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 as free space.

Add more RAM. If your computer has less than 2 GBs of RAM and you are using OS X Leopard or later, then you can do with more RAM. Snow Leopard and Lion work much better with 4 GBs of RAM than their system minimums. The more concurrent applications you tend to use the more RAM you should have.

Always maintain at least 15 GBs or 10% of your hard drive's capacity as free space, whichever is greater. OS X is frequently accessing your hard drive, so providing adequate free space will keep things from slowing down.

Check for applications that may be hogging the CPU:

Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder.  Select All Processes from the Processes dropdown menu.  Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order.  If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time, then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar.  Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process.  See if that helps.  Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.

Often this problem occurs because of a corrupted cache or preferences file or an attempt to write to a corrupted log file.

You can repair the main Hitachi entry which verifies the boot block. Repairing the hard drive and permissions should be done on the Macintosh HD volume entry. Be sure you perform the Repairs options, and not the Verify options.

SMART status is only reported on the main Hitachi entry.

From here I would try Safe Mode boot then reboot normally.

Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder.  Select All Processes from the Processes dropdown menu.  Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order.  If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time (>=70,) then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar.  Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process.  See if that helps.  Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.

It would help to post a snapshot of your Activiy Monitor's display with the CPU% column set as the sort key (click the column header.) Be sure it also includes the bottom status display. The bottom display should be showing Memory usage.

Then quit all your third-party applications and utilities. If you have any startup items they, too, should be removed. Reboot the computer with all that stuff turned off, then see if it is still slow.

No, but it does not load third-party system additions and clears some caches, so it can help make the computer run better as well as identify possible third-party software issues.

I see nothing in Activity Monitor that would cause any slowdowns.

Have you looked in your Console (Utilities folder) log for long series of repetitive messages? Such things usually mean a program may be feeding continuous error messages to the log file which uses a lot of CPU time. Do you happen to notice if there is a lot of disk reads and/or writes going on continually? If you do, then you need to check the Ubiquity folder in the /Home/Library/Applications Support/ folder. Open the folder to see if you notice that the files are being continuously changed. If they are it will cause an observable slow down. Needless to say it's a b***h to fix.

I could also suggest you dump all the cache files you find in /Home/Library/Caches/ folder.

Not too much more one can do, so you'll need to provide additional information as to what makes you believe it's running slow.

Items 3 and 4 are "normal" in 10.9. Entries usually are over 4,000, so no issue with that. You need to get rid of all your Google stuff.

I use a utility called, EasyFind 4.9.2, to look for stuff anywhere on the drive very quickly. Better than using Spotlight and it doesn't use time and disk space for an index.

I don't know, but until you disable or remove them you don't know if they contribute to your computer running slowly.

One must start with an essentially clean system to know what would be normal. Then you can start adding stuff back one at a time to determine if one or more items cause the computer to run slower than normal.

There is excessive swapping of data between physical memory (that is, the memory chips on the logic board) and virtual memory (one or more files on the startup volume.) That activity is relatively slow and causes the whole system to be less responsive. It can happen for two reasons:

• A long-running process with a memory leak (a kind of bug)
• Not enough memory for your usage pattern

Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination.

Start by uninstalling "Sophos," which is completely useless and may be contributing to your problem.

Remove the Sophos product by following the instructions on this page. If you have a different version, the procedure may be different.

Back up all data before making any changes. If you still have problems after doing that and rebooting, continue.

When you notice the swap activity, open the Activity Monitor application and select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if it's not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If you don't see that column, select

View ▹ Columns ▹ Real Memory

from the menu bar.

If one process (excluding "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more real memory over time without ever releasing it. Here is an example of how it's done.

The process named "Safari Web Content" renders web pages for Safari and other applications. It uses a lot of memory and may leak if certain Safari extensions or third-party web plugins are installed. Consider it a prime suspect.

Another process often implicated in memory leaks is "inkjet4" or "inkjet8," which is a component of the HP printing software. If it's present, force-quit the process in Activity Monitor to solve the problem temporarily. Empty the print queues in the Printers & Scanners preference pane (which has a slightly different name in each recent version of OS X.) If you don't use an HP printer, remove the software. Otherwise, if the problem is recurrent, update the software (which may not help) or contact HP support.

The System Memory tab of the Activity Monitor window shows how physical memory is being used. "Wired" memory should be a small part of the total. That memory is not swapped, but it makes less physical memory available which may then result in swapping. If you have a lot of wired memory, that's usually an indication of a memory leak in a third-party program that modifies the operating system at a low level. Ask for guidance in that case.

If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.

The next suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command: 

sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total

where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details.

He's got 8 GBs of RAM  of which he hardly uses half. How is that not enough memory for his usage pattern?