Painfully slow MacBook Pro. EtreCheck says "poor." Can you explain what it means?

[LivingWaterBooks]

I'm just a casual user, but I've been doing everything possible to fix my painfully slow MacBook Pro. It seemed like the problem started after loading Sierra a few months ago, and has only gotten worse since then. I've reloaded Sierra, didn't help. I ran disk first aid and didn’t find anything. I reset the SMC and PRAM. I tried booting in safe mode and it was just as slow. I also made a test user and it was just as slow.

I read about EtreCheck so I ran it. It agrees with me that performance is "poor." Can someone interpret the results (attached) and give me some tips for fixing my MacBook Pro? Thanks so much.

Lois

 

[honestone]

While EtreCheck is a "decent" tool, it cannot tell the entire story. We need some additional information:

1. What exact MacBook Pro model do you have? If it is "somewhat" old, and has a traditional HDD inside, it most likely spins at 5400 rpm. That is certainly no speed demon, that's for sure!

2. What exact version of Sierra are you running? V10.12.6 came out about 2 weeks ago. Not sure if it will make a difference, but it's always good to keep up to date.

3. Associated with #1, have you ever done any disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, from a software perspective? You can do a lot on your own, and there are some excellent tools available (both free and commercial) that can help you with that.

4. Are you making backups to an external device? That also is critical.

5. How have you "moved"/upgraded to Sierra? If you have just upgraded "in place", that process is not always the best, especially if you have not done much of #3 above. If you have a recent backup, then maybe a clean, fresh, "virgin" installation of Sierra is in order.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Since you are running macOS Sierra on a MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) with 4 GB RAM and a 750 GB 5400 rpm HD, your Mac is basically at the bare minimum for Sierra. It would benefit you somewhat to upgrade the RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB, but it's not totally necessary. A quick speedup you can easily do, due to the limited graphics power, is to check the box next to  > System Preferences... > Accessibility > Display > Reduce transparency.

From the other info in your attached EtreCheck PDF, it seems you have some older software loaded that is not compatible with Sierra (or even Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite and later), so that may be another part of the slowness. There is a lot of software that should be uninstalled/removed or updated/upgraded:
-Palm Software
-Adobe CS3/CS4/CS5
-Soundflower
-roxio Toast/Blu-ray Support
-Seagate Tools
-Parallels 4.0
-Flip4Mac
-Coupon Printer - Firefox
-CepstralVoices
-DejaVu
-SmartSleep
-DEVONthink Pro

I see you have MalwareBytes Anti-Malware for Mac installed. I would definitely make sure it is up to date, and run it when you can.

Because so much of the older software is loading at startup, you will definitely see a speed increase if you remove it. If you need additional information on apps that you really need/use a lot, feel free to ask and we'll explore it further.

Hope that helps,

C

 

[LivingWaterBooks]

While EtreCheck is a "decent" tool, it cannot tell the entire story. We need some additional information:

1. What exact MacBook Pro model do you have? If it is "somewhat" old, and has a traditional HDD inside, it most likely spins at 5400 rpm. That is certainly no speed demon, that's for sure!

2. What exact version of Sierra are you running? V10.12.6 came out about 2 weeks ago. Not sure if it will make a difference, but it's always good to keep up to date.

3. Associated with #1, have you ever done any disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, from a software perspective? You can do a lot on your own, and there are some excellent tools available (both free and commercial) that can help you with that.

4. Are you making backups to an external device? That also is critical.

5. How have you "moved"/upgraded to Sierra? If you have just upgraded "in place", that process is not always the best, especially if you have not done much of #3 above. If you have a recent backup, then maybe a clean, fresh, "virgin" installation of Sierra is in order.

Hello and welcome.

Since you are running macOS Sierra on a MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) with 4 GB RAM and a 750 GB 5400 rpm HD, your Mac is basically at the bare minimum for Sierra. It would benefit you somewhat to upgrade the RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB, but it's not totally necessary. A quick speedup you can easily do, due to the limited graphics power, is to check the box next to  > System Preferences... > Accessibility > Display > Reduce transparency.

From the other info in your attached EtreCheck PDF, it seems you have some older software loaded that is not compatible with Sierra (or even Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite and later), so that may be another part of the slowness. There is a lot of software that should be uninstalled/removed or updated/upgraded:
-Palm Software
-Adobe CS3/CS4/CS5
-Soundflower
-roxio Toast/Blu-ray Support
-Seagate Tools
-Parallels 4.0
-Flip4Mac
-Coupon Printer - Firefox
-CepstralVoices
-DejaVu
-SmartSleep
-DEVONthink Pro

I see you have MalwareBytes Anti-Malware for Mac installed. I would definitely make sure it is up to date, and run it when you can.

Because so much of the older software is loading at startup, you will definitely see a speed increase if you remove it. If you need additional information on apps that you really need/use a lot, feel free to ask and we'll explore it further.

Hope that helps,

C

Thanks for all of this!

I've been cleaning and repairing permissions with Onyx periodically and backing up my hard drive to an external drive weekly. I upgraded to Sierra a few months ago and I did a whole new install overnight last night. No difference. It looks like I have the newest Sierra version.

I'm now doing some of these things you suggested to speed up my drive. Changing the transparency has helped already, I think. I need to delete the old software too. I'm going to order some more RAM for my computer too. Is 8 the maximum possible?

 

[honestone]

Cory is the man! I should have looked at the EtreCheck report.

Regarding disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, Onyx is good, but you need to do more. You actually can do a good amount of disk cleanup yourself. Also, you should invest in a more robust disk maintenance/repair program. I use Tech Tool Pro (along with Onyx, and my own disk cleanup efforts), and it certainly helps in keeping both of my Macs "lean, mean, and clean".

As Cory so correctly pointed out, you can upgrade the RAM to 8 gig, and that would be more than enough. But, unless you run multiple programs simultaneously, or use any RAM-intensive software, 4 gig is actually enough.

If you are going to remove/delete any applications, just dragging the app to the trash does not get rid of everything. So, you could download and install the excellent free application AppCleaner, available from here:

https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/