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Question

Why is my Mac slow and gets the spinning dial of death?

May 10, 2011 1:40AM PDT

I have a 2 year old MacBook Pro and it has become very slow and gets the spinning dial of death frequently in which I have to hard kill the laptop?

Discussion is locked

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Clarification Request
Just sharing.
May 10, 2011 3:43AM PDT

Just last month I had a friend with nearly the same complaint. They had never heard about using canned air to get the lint and dust out of the vents. Turns out the unit was getting too hot.
Bob

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Answer
First try Bob's idea
May 10, 2011 10:19AM PDT

First try Bob's idea, since it's both quick, easy, and cheap. If that doesn't work, I'd be willing to bet a shiny nickel that you have a failing HDD. Good news here is that it's reasonably easy to replace, assuming you have a unibody MacBook Pro. The quick and easy way to tell is to look at the sides of the computer. If you see screws, then you have an older style system which you probably will want to take somewhere. Unibody models only have about 8 screws on the bottom. Those you can take off with a PH00 screwdriver, and then the HDD is pretty easy to spot. Just be careful when pulling it out, because if you rip or damage the thin flat cable connecting it, you just probably doubled the price of the repair. Any 2.5" SATA HDD should work.

Also, the normal disclaimer here. If you purchased the AppleCare warranty or some kind of store warranty, then don't touch a thing. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to whichever establishment you have an arrangement with and let it be their problem to fix. You paid them money up front to take care of these kinds of things, so let them earn some of that money.

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Answer
Macbook Pro slow down
May 13, 2011 9:26PM PDT

A little maintenance might fix the problem. Look in your utilities folder, open Disk Utility and have it verify and repair disk permissions. Also check that all your RAM is being accessed. if a logic board is dead your computer will still work but it will be slow. You could download a free anti-virus program and make sure you haven't picked up a virus.

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Just saying
May 13, 2011 10:33PM PDT

Just saying that while a logic board COULD cause these problems, it's pretty unlikely. In the two instances where I've seen a performance issue tied to the logic board, usually the system is VERY slow to boot, often times won't boot consistently, but once it does finally boot, for whatever reason, it runs fine.

And the number of viruses (and worms, trojans, malware, etc that people often lump under the general term "virus") that can actually attack OS X can be counted on one hand pretty much. All but maybe one or two are proof of concept, and the one or two that aren't, require considerable amounts of user interaction to install. Granted at least a few people have been fooled by the Mac Protector thing, but I would put that possibility of a virus at just this side of impossible.

The permissions thing is also unlikely to resolve anything, but it takes maybe 5 minutes to try, and there's virtually zero down side, so why not.

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Answer
Disk space & Memory
May 14, 2011 9:30AM PDT

I have had the exact same issue.. On two Macbook Pros bought around same time.. One is worse than the other..

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Sorry, but
May 14, 2011 1:02PM PDT

Sorry, but the whole 10% free space thing is a complete load of crap. Seriously... Say you have a 1TB drive. You're saying that you should PERMANENTLY IDLE 100GB?! Does that really sound like a reasonable idea? The 10% figure made a lot more sense when a 1GB HDD was a big deal, and most drives were measured in MB, and the same went for RAM. You had UP TO maybe 512MB of RAM if you had a real top of the line system. So keeping say 100MB free on a system with 512MB or less sounds a whole lot more reasonable than 100GB on a system with 2-4GB of RAM. It's like the whole memory thing with laptop batteries... It's a bit of stale advice that has perpetuated despite the fact that it no longer makes any kind of sense.

Really, all you need is probably 100-200MB of free space to allow the swap file to grow if needed. If you're using more than that in swap, there's an excellent chance there's a bigger issue that needs to be sorted.