My Mac Book Pro is slow? Any ideas on how to speed it up?

Replace 4GB ram with 16GB (about $200) and replace your hard drive with a 2 terabyte drive spinning at 7200 rpm (about $120). Both can be done at home in 10 minutes with a tiny philips head screwdriver. Do a google search on how. Buy from Amazon or other; no need to pay Apple prices.

 

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Yosemite really seemed to slow my machine down. Until then, it had been running like the day I bought it.

 

Go to the spotlight search (the magnifying glass on the upper right corner), type "disk utility."

Click on the main hard drive.

Run "repair permissions."

Then run, "verify disk", followed by "repair disk" if necessary.

Virtually all speed problems on Macs boil down to bad sectors or permissions, which can be fixed with the disk utility.

 

Yup, 2 8gb chips. Make sure the ram chips run at the same speed as the ones you're replacing and that they have the same number of pins. Simple enough.

 

Also check Activity Monitor to make sure you don't have rogue processes/daemons running that are sucking up CPU.

For example, as much as I love Google Drive, it does use up quite a bit of CPU when syncing. Same for Crashplan (which I also love).

 

If you don't have an SSD, that is the single fastest upgrade you can make. Sorry, but you won't see THAT much improvement with more RAM unless you are running very RAM intensive programs. I run two web browsers, a text editor, accounting software, Photoshop, Illustrator, anti-virus, a proxy internet client, an FTP client, and stream HD video simultaneously from my mid-2013 Macbook with 4GB of RAM with zero issues.

You can get a 500GB SSD on Amazon right now for under $200 (Crucial brand), which is the best price yet.

 

Seems like that would be faster, but 500gb is not enough primary storage for me, and I don't like traveling with external hard disks that add more.

 

If your MBP has an optical drive, consider swapping it out for either a SSD (for booting and loading program - you'll see real speed improvements) or a larger HD (non-SSD) if you're after a ton of space (and already have a SSD for booting). There are a few kits out there that make swapping easy.

FWIW, my mid-2008 MacBook with 8GB of RAM and a 60GB SSD handles Yosemite well. Boot-up slowed a little over previous builds, but other than that it runs nicely.

 

That's a lot of storage needs! You must do a lot of video editing.

They make zippy 1TB hybrid drives that work pretty well. It is a good balance. There are 1TB SSD's out there, but they are in the 400 dollar range.

 

Nope, no video editing, however the docs in some of my cases (I'm a lawyer) can get as big as 80gig (Some defendants think they can hide the golden pony in a mountain of horse poop).

I recently moved up to a 2TB drive as my primary in the macbook pro so I don't have to worry about shuffling directories to other disks.

Good thing the bigger drives aren't heavier than the smaller ones!

 

Then you need to buy a SSD drive, and probably more memory.

 

Try the software hints 1st if this doesn't do it then go with memory/hd upgrades

Check there are no unneeded programs running in the backgruond in your login
System Prefs>Users&Groups>loginItems highlight and delete

try this too
6 Easy Tips to Speed Up OS X Yosemite on Your Mac