13-inch Mid-2012 Macbook Pro Lagging Tremendously

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13-inch Mid-2012 Macbook Pro Lagging Tremendously

I have a 13-inch Mid-2012 Macbook Pro that's been lagging a ridiculous amount for several months now. I often struggle to get anything accomplished because of how prone the computer is to freezing up whenever I open any application. I'm not the most tech-savvy person, so it's taken me a while to reach out for help. I found Etrecheck and generated a report using that.

The OS is Mojave 10.14.6. The memory usage is only 70 GB out of 500 GB. When I opened up Activity Monitor, I saw a long, long list of processes running in the background, most of which I can't identify.

I've backed up everything on the computer, and all I can think to do at this point is to reformat the entire hard drive, but that'd be a whole involved thing. Can anyone help me?

EtreCheck Report

Posted on Apr 19, 2021 1:29 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

rcosta887

Level 4

3,604 points

Apr 19, 2021 1:43 PM in response to Wending_stone

If your MacBook is frequently freezing, such as a spinning beach ball and the mouse freezing from movement even when you aren't doing anything (just sitting there staring at the screen) and it's doing this more than once a minute then you are experiencing a hard disk drive (HDD) in the final stages of failure.

For a 2012 MacBook Pro getting close to 10 years this is not at all surprising.

If you have data you care about you should immediately make a Time Machine backup by buying an external USB hard drive for about $70 and using the Time Machine App:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250

You should then follow the advice in EtreCheck and replace your HDD with a modern SATA SSD. Not only will it fix this problem but your 2012 MacBook Pro will run noticeably faster than it ever has before (even faster than when it was brand new).

Note: the one thing you don't want to do is upgrade your macOS. That would most likely immediately send your drive over the edge.

Once you've upgraded the drive with an off-the-shelf SATA Solid State Disk drive (like from Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples, any computer shop) you can boot up with the Time Machine drive (holding the Option key) and restore from that backup onto the new SSD drive.

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Answer 2

Apr 19, 2021 1:57 PM in response to rcosta887

Thank you for the reply! It isn't freezing when I do nothing, but it does often do so whenever I try to do things. I noticed that the RAM usage looked really high.

Virtual Memory Information:

Physical RAM: 8 GB

Free RAM: 186 MB

Used RAM: 5.11 GB

Cached files: 2.71 GB

Available RAM: 2.89 GB

Swap Used: 0 B

During my trolling the web for answers, I vaguely recall a mention of available RAM getting "used up if it's there" on older computers because of some error. Could that be related?

As far as backups, I have a Seagate 5TB external hard drive. I haven't done a time machine backup on it because I've been using it to back up multiple devices manually (including my computer), and I'm worried that doing a time machine backup will wipe out everything else backed up there. Am I wrong? I know I had to download some special software (NTFS something) to be able to copy files to the external hard drive. I've just been copy-pasting the user & library & system folders from my laptop to back things up.

I also noticed that there are some Avast apps listed on that report. I thought I uninstalled Avast a few days ago, but it looks like some stuff is still lingering. By the way, I have since uninstalled Adobe Flash as it suggested.

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Answer 3

HWTech

Level 9

59,846 points

Apr 19, 2021 6:28 PM in response to Wending_stone

Your RAM looks good. Only worry about memory when Activity Monitor's memory tab show high memory pressure (yellow or especially red) or if you end up with GBs of Swap Outs.

As @rcosta887 mentioned the hard drive is most likely worn out or failing. There is also a possibility that the hard drive SATA Cable is bad which is extremely common with your exact model laptop.

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13-inch Mid-2012 Macbook Pro Lagging Tremendously

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