Superslow after upgrade to ElCapitan

[JohnRA]

I upgraded my MacBook Pro from 10.6.8 to El Capitan and the machine has become fantastically slow: it now takes 10s of seconds to switch between applications that are already open, or to open a file for which the software (such as Word) is already running. The machine has a 2.26 GHz core duo, 2GB of memory and 16 GB of available hard drive.

Right after the upgrade, the hard drive on the machine ran for many hours (the machine got warm). Is this typical, e.g., due to optimizing the drive or re-cataloging the drive?

The machine is only barely usable. Help! What could be causing this huge decline in performance, and can it be fixed? Thanks for your suggestions.

 

[honestone]

First of all, you need 4 meg of RAM, total.

Secondly, 16 GB of free space is very little on your internal drive. You need to clean off as much stuff as possible.

Third, have you ever done any disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs? That is certainly a necessity, even if you have a lot of hard disk space.

Fourth, are you making backups to an external drive?