A1932 with a very slow OS and the fan going nuts

[pfabra]

Hi there team,

This is my first post here, and straight away a question. I hope you still gonna help me

I have a A1932 (bought new a while ago) and for a while now, the fan is going nuts and the os is slow as. I have 8GB ram and CleanMyMac sometimes indicates only 32MB left, only having Thunderbird and Chrome (2-3 tabs) open.
The Battery status says "normal" and 377 cycles. I tried to go into diagnostics modus but will get the error message "support.apple.com/mac/startup -2002D
I opened the bottom and checked for dirt....seems fairly clean to me and not seen any lose connections.

Any ideas of what else I could check?

Thanks & Cheers from New Zealand,
Pascal

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Sorry for the delayed response.

• That model is either a MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2018) or MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2019)
• What version of macOS?
• Do you have any other third-party utilities like an antivirus running, especially in real-time monitoring mode?
• How much free space do you have?
• How often do you restart?

C

 

[pfabra]

Hi Cory,
no worries. Also took me a while to get back behind my display.
It is indeed a Retina, 13-inch, 2019 with 1.6 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 and 8GB ram.
Currently, I am running Sonoma 14.3 on it, with no other utilities and around 89GB of free disk space. I really took everything off, as I can't even run Thunderbird and Chrome at the same time. The fan is running like nuts as soon as I have 3-5 tabs open.
Restart? Not that often. But i recently shut it down to take the bottom lid off to see if it is just dirty. Was clean as.

Cheers,

 

[TonyAguila]

Did you try restarting in Safe Mode? It looks like you are running low on RAM and disk space. Try archiving data that you don’t immediately need to regain more storage space. I have experienced noticeable improvements since upgrading to macOS 14.4. You may wish to try it as well.

 

[pfabra]

Hi Tony,

Well it says I am having 89GB free. I am not sure about the ram but the activity indicator says i have 2 ish cached ram. I have updated to 14.4 and so far I had it only twice. BUT i also have to say: I uninstalled all apps i am not actively using. And I have the fan running bonkers while I am using chrome, Thunderbird OR Apple Mail, and maybe Whatsapp Messenger. Everything else is off. I can not imagine that this brings the macbook already to its boundaries?! My partner has a 2012 macbook pro, the entry version. She has three chromes, two firefox and each with 30 tabs open....and no issues at all.



Thanks for your help though.Not sure what I could do.I red this model has sometimes probs with the battery. Not sure if I should just buy one. This one has only 380 cycles.

 

[pfabra]

Hi Tony,

I just restarted and held shift to get into safe mode. After a few minutes the fan went off and at some stage, i assume screensaver came on, the display went totally white and i had to do a hard restart

 

[TonyAguila]

Hi Tony,

I just restarted and held shift to get into safe mode. After a few minutes the fan went off and at some stage, i assume screensaver came on, the display went totally white and i had to do a hard restart

Everything still points to not enough RAM and disk space. All my clients who purchased Macs with the base configuration complained about this. I lament the fact that they did not consult me first before making the purchase. A couple, at least, were able to return their Macs and replaced them with more storage and random access memory. The easiest fix I would recommend for you is to get external storage and move data that you will not need away from home (i.e. when you can’t have the external drive with you) to the external drive. If you decide to uninstall apps, make sure you use cleaner apps (e.g. AppCleaner.app) to remove all other files associated with them, not just the single file.

There are also utilities that can optimize your system to gain more drive space. Things like launch services, font caches, spotlight data, etc., can be optimized. I highly recommend the venerable freeware Onyx.app. Unfortunately not much can be done to alleviate the RAM issue, aside from running less background processes and apps that you take for granted, like Mail and web browsers.

 

[pfabra]

I have 92GB out of 256GB free disk space. I can not imagine that this isn't enough. I have uninstalled almost every app i do not need frequently and used indeed AppCleaner. I also deactivated apps that were running in the background. I also had Onyx and other apps already running to see if there will be improvement. Unfortunately not really. I hear your message and I generally agree. The only active apps are Thunderbird and Chrome. Chrome with 3-5 tabs. I can not imagine that the 16GB Ram is insufficient to run these two apps.

 

[TonyAguila]

I have 92GB out of 256GB free disk space. I can not imagine that this isn't enough. I have uninstalled almost every app i do not need frequently and used indeed AppCleaner. I also deactivated apps that were running in the background. I also had Onyx and other apps already running to see if there will be improvement. Unfortunately not really. I hear your message and I generally agree. The only active apps are Thunderbird and Chrome. Chrome with 3-5 tabs. I can not imagine that the 16GB Ram is insufficient to run these two apps.

Open Activity Monitor (/System/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app) and on top, click on the Memory Tab. At the bottom, look at the Memory Pressure section. In my situation, I have 32 gibibytes of RAM and with less than normal use, I’m using about 25 gibibytes. I know I’m still in a good place because the MEMORY PRESSURE graph is low and all green. See what your readings show.

I also don’t have to worry about storage space and swap files. I have 2-terabytes in my system disk, and plenty of external storage for data I don’t need in my system volume. If you are using iCloud, perhaps turning on Optimize Mac Storage can help.

 

[Mcarli]

Hi Tony, i see you are a real expert so let me ask you quite same question but with my iMac, i have similar problem, my mac is extremely slow, when it starts it takes like 20 min to be ready to use it and when i use it the fans go really loud. I have 32 gb of ram and 1TB of space where aprox 650 gb is free.
Any idea why is that happening?

 

[MacsBug]

Hi mCarli, welcome to the forum.

You don‘t say which iMac your running or which version of the MacOS your running.

Most likely the issue that your experiencing though is due to running MacOS Catalina or later on a spinning drive that is formatted as APFS. Over time APFS is really hard on spinning drives slowing them down to a crawl.

To get your iMac more functional, you would need to replace the spinning hard drive with an SSD, Depending on which iMac you have will depend on the exact recommedation for an SSD.