MacBookPro, slow, see beach ball a lot

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Level 1

27 points

MacBookPro, slow, see beach ball a lot

I have noticed that my MacBookPro boots up really slowly. Also when I open a program I will see the spinning beach ball frequently.

I have too many emails so wonder if that is part of it. Its showing my inbox has over 38k messages. I try to go in & delete unneeded ones periodically & I did unsubscribe from several lists, but still I get a lot of email every day & I only delete some of it right then so it piles up.

Currently running OS 10.9.5 on a mid 2012 13 MBP w 4 GB memory.

I typically will have Safari, Mail, maybe Contacts, Calendar & maybe Pages & Numbers & Adobe Reader & Messages. I also have VeeSee conferencing software. I connect to internet using wifi w the modem right next to the Mac.

I used to use it every day, but since I got my iPad Mini, I find that I just use that for most of what I do so mostly just use the Mac when I need to print, or when I want to be going back & forth between different screens, etc.

So wondering what I should do to get things working faster.

I also sync w my iPhone 5C & my iPad Mini both running iOS7.1.2

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1), Win7 as VM in Parallels 8

Posted on Dec 4, 2014 2:59 AM

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Answer 1

OGELTHORPE

Level 9

57,329 points

Dec 4, 2014 3:42 AM in response to KathiMR

Look over this post for possible solutions:

http://www.thesafemac.com/mpg/

And this ine:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3521

Ciao.

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Answer 2

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,739 points

Dec 4, 2014 9:19 AM in response to KathiMR

When you have the problem, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.

The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select

SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages

from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.

Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.

Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.

The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.

Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.

Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

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Answer 3

Dec 4, 2014 9:39 AM in response to KathiMR

I think I see your problem. Are you running Mac OS and Windows OS at the same time on VM in Parallels 8? If you are, VM will use a max of 2GB of RAM for Windows and seeing that you have 4GB of RAM, that takes half of the RAM away from the Mac OS. You could also reset the SMC and PRAM if you haven't already. Don't worry, they're very easy to reset and don't require any tools. If you don't know how to do it, just google it. If that doesn't help, you may not have enough RAM installed to support Windows and Mac at the same time. My uncle had a similar problem on his 2011 Pro. I'm not familiar with VM but if you can, try and use your Mac without VM running and see how it does. If it runs better without VM running, you should get more RAM. You can buy it from a lot of places, even Apple, but there are cheaper places out there. Thankfully you have a non-retina pro so you can upgrade the RAM. Check out www.crucialmemory.com and download their system scanner and run it. It will then bring you to their website that will pull up available RAM and hard drive kits for your make and model. I highly recommend getting the 8GB (two 4GB sticks). You can go up to 16GB but 8 should be enough for you.

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