Really slow Mac - any easy solutions?

[TR888]

I'm using my Mac a lot for work and it's really slow now. What can I do to make it quicker, would resetting it back to factory settings help? I haven't got a ton of apps in it or anything, it's the usual photos, documents and so on.

It's probably 6 years old I think, is it realistically time to buy a new one?

Back up anything you are likely to need again, then restore factory settings.

I bought a new one - i had a 6 year old MacBook Air that completely hated Teams, and the new one copes much better.

There's been a few updates out for Macs recently. Have you updated yours? If not it might be that.

Following with interest. Mine was a late 2015 model and suddenly slowed down to the point of being practically un-usable. It took me two days to back up everything on it before buying a new one and doing a full factory re-set on the old one. It is still slow, however. I think there's something fundamentally wrong with it.

The older machines don't seem to like the newer operating systems. Catalina finished it off!!

Thank you for your advice. So if I restore factory settings it's not a guarantee it would be quicker, from what you say? I will look at installing the most recent updates. I did try a few months ago but it wouldn't let me go through the process, I think my Mac is possibly too old for the new updates.

I've had a look at prices for new Macs and they are around £2,000!

I bought some extra ram memory which sped up my 2011 model very noticeably (until the hard drive went ).

I got it from crucial memory, where they have a computer scanner that recommends what memory to get. It was quite cheap, and very easy to do myself. They have how to videos on their site as well.

Have you done the obvious things of clear all history, delete all cookies, put all unwanted emails in the trash and delete them in Finder? Clear your desktop and delete all unnecessary documents.

I find I need to do all those things periodically or my MAC slows right down.

Ours slowed right down after 'upgrading' to Catalina, which I only did because DS wanted to play Fortnite. Fortnite downloaded but still won't work and Mac is slow.

Toying with restoring it back to the earlier OS. (I time-machined it before upgrading) but we're relying on it for online learning at the moment and I'm scared.

(And it HATES teams).

I was using my ancient 2013 Macbook Pro for WfH when we first started. It HATED being used full time, and slowed and slowed. It barely functioned when Teams was open.

I bought a subscription to Clean My Mac, which helped it keep going for a few months longer, but in the end had to get a new laptop through work (not a Mac ).

I just use my Mac for perosnal use no, but it is getting close to unsuably slow - perhaps a full reset might work.

I use clean my Mac too, which helps, but mine is an old 2009 model and quite frankly, I can’t believe it’s still going. I get a notification almost everyday that I have less than 1gb of space left (tiny ram) and have to do a mad clean my Mac scan to try and eeeeeeek out a mini 0.6 of something to keep going.

I have nothing on there, everything is stored in Dropbox cloud or iCloud but it’s just ancient and the updates take up too much space (can’t even upgrade to the new seat update as it needs something like 17gb which my start up disk just cannot find)

But yes, can’t afford £2k for a new one

You may need to upgrade memory to support more modern programmes or get an ssd hard drive which makes quite a difference to speed. I have a mid 2012 which slowed when Apple did the faces thing with photos and that took forever. When I took the photos and photoshop off (transferred to newer more capable
Mac) the 2012 one worked absolutely fine for browsing, teams and word.

I think I read this tip on a Mac forum somewhere but can't remember where exactly. I try to remember regularly to close down all programs and then go to the "Go" menu at the top of the screen, then type in ~/Library/Caches/, put everything that is in there in the bin, and empty the bin. It effectively clears the caches for every program, and you should notice an improvement in performance.

I'm also very strict about emptying the history on my Internet browsers (pretty much all my work involves searching or using cloud based software). And yes to the updates, though don't get me started on how many packages don't work properly under Catalina and will now have to either be scrapped, replaced, or upgraded when they've worked fine for years....!

Thank you. I'm going to try some of these solutions. I haven't even done the basics... I'm not very knowledgeable about computers despite using them all the time.