I'll throw in one more to this excellent list (and it's a very likely
contender so try it sooner rather than later) - I wonder if it's low on
RAM? The clumsy but easy way to find out is to quit everything but the
Finder and see if it's more responsive. Looking at 'About this Mac'
(under the apple menu, it will say 'Memory' then probably 4 gigs) will
help work this out. If it's 4, it's probably RAM shortage.
The *exact* way is to fire up Activity Monitor and select the tab marked
'Memory'. If the graph below is green when these things are running,
it's fine. If it's red, the machine doesn't have enough RAM and you
should try quitting everything you can do without. Please note
individual tabs in Safari can easily be chewing up 100 mb *each* so
close all unused tabs too.
4 gigs is really pushing it nowadays as the OS takes so much so if it is
that, I'd consider upgrading the RAM and/or getting SSD (doesn't always
cure this slowness though, oddly).
good luck,
Jason
On 5 May 2020, at 12:25, John Patrick wrote:
Hi Tilly,
Few questions I would normally ask;
1. Is it HHD (Hard Disk) or SSD (Solid State Disk)?
- I've got a 2013 MBP with an SSD and 16GB Ram and it's still
lightning fast
2. How full is the hard disk?
- Often the closer to full a hard drive gets the slower it is, due to
how it allocates new things it saves and have it prevents ssd having
the same memory over used.
- For non MacOS I run SpinRite which is a HHD health check and
recovery tool and can often spring life back into a hard disk.
3. Have you tried another browser like Firefox or Chrome or Safari?
- As some websites seam faster / slower in different browsers
4. Is it setup for Timemachine backups?
- When was the last backup?
- Is it trying to do a backup, try pausing backup and retesting
5. Try speedtest https://www.speedtest.net/
- In some rooms I get dramatically different speeds and different
latencies
- Lots of websites, especially video or audit don't handle high
latency
- Also some websites might fail to load correctly is high latency
6. Have you tried updating to the latest macos version?
- 10.15.4 macOS Catalina is the latest version
- be aware some older programs might stop working after upgrade, so
maybe do full time machine backup beforehand so you can revert.
7. Do you have Anti Virus?
- Some are better than others
- If you do check, latest version, check it isn't doing a fully scan
but you might be shutting it down before it completes so on next
restart it will start from the beginning again.
8. When was the last restart?
- Sometimes my macbook won't be restart for 6 months
9. What is setup to automatically start at login
- System Preferences -> Users & Groups -> Select the User -> Login
Items
None of the above might help, but it might aid understand what is no
slowing it down.
John
On Tue, 5 May 2020 at 10:58, Tilly <[email protected]>
wrote:
Dear All,
Any suggestions appreciated. My son has a MacBook Pro (about 3 years
old) and is using it for Googlehangouts for college work. Today it
has taken about 25 minutes for him to get on to the class he is
supposed to be in. I hadn't realised how ridiculously slow his laptop
is - I can't see any particular reason for it. Are there some ways to
speed it up? I seem to remember in the old days we had to 'Zap the
Pram' - is that still something we should try? And how would we do
it? Sorry if all this is pretty basic but I thought I'd reach out to
you guys as I know someone will know what to do.
thanks
Tilly
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