Q: Do IntelHD chips in MacBook Airs just start underperforming?
So I have a Core i5 MBA. 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD and it's probably the weirdest machine I've ever owned.
The speakers just didn't work at all until yesterday when it just magically started working, which - as a 16 year senior technician - that actually mystified me, but whatever... audio works now, so I'm not questioning it any further.
The problem I'm here for is that it's all around sluggish. Moving through the dock, the magnification is extremely choppy, scrolling is choppy, moving the mouse around happens at a framerate so poor that I'd swear I was on a 20 year old Compaq.
To relate the experience I'm having - it feels like any Windows machine would if it were freshly restored without the graphics driver... except, on a Windows machine, I can just hunt down the device's hardware ID, find the graphics driver and everything is smooth again... but I'm not as well-versed in the language of Macish. From what I've researched, the graphics driver for my machine's Intel HD3000 is bundled in with updates so it would appear I have to rely on kext tools within terminal to *possibly* trigger my graphics extension.
None of that seems to get me anywhere. I've tried internet recovery multiple times, followed it up with every available update 10.7 has access to... and performed at least 15 search result pages' worth of tricks to no avail. Whatever's going on also seems to brick my machine if I try to update to El Capitan from the App Store. Tested the SSD to see if that could be the culprit, it all verified just fine. I'd think that the gfx being integrated would mean that if my gfx adapter were dead, I wouldn't be able to have it pass hardware diagnostics (or even turn it on successfully).
Only thing I haven't tried so far is getting the DMG for ElCapitan and creating a bootable drive to see if latest MacOSX just quick fixes everything (which I'll be doing tonight).
If that gets me nowhere... what could this problem be?
MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.5)
Posted on Sep 14, 2016 4:16 PM
Apple store time
Posted on Sep 17, 2016 3:48 PM