Young MacBook Pro very sick, please advise

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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook Pro 15"
Processor 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Startup Disk Macintosh HD

I had about 64GB of free space when it happened. My 6 month old 15" MacBook Pro began to struggle a few days ago. I had watched a couple of dvd's and imported some files from my camera. iPhoto and iTunes were both open as well as a few Safari pages and things were getting abnormally slow, every action had a delay followed by the spinning rainbow circle, the importing process froze and a couple of times I had to force quit by holding down the on/off switch.

I switched on again after letting it rest for a bit and ended up with just a blue screen and the mouse arrow. No toolbar, no dock. I powered off again and later I had the dock but it would come and go, the finder window was pen but everything was frozen. I took it to an authorized Apple retailer and they said they would need to backup everything, so I bought a 1TB hard drive with me and when I got the laptop back it was back to factory settings and about 40% of my data had been successfully saved, though they didn't re install iLife and all my iTunes and photos have gone, as well as FCP and a whole load of other apps I will ned to re-install or download when I return from my holiday.

I now have 732.82 GB available but everything is still disgracefully slow and sluggish for such a young machine with so much free space as if it is threatening to happen again. I do not feel confident enough to import the data that survived or use my laptop again for work until I know what is wrong, but it should be working perfectly and I should not be seeing the spinning rainbow circle (there must be a proper word for this!) but I am despite not overloading it, it should be able to multi task anyway! Safari is particularly slow yet I'm in a decent WIFI zone.

Any ideas what the issue is here and what to do next?

It should still be under warranty as I bought it in May.
 
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Shoeboat
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Unable to play iTunes movie trailer or YouTube video without the picture freezing as the sound continues. iTunes tracks can't play without stopping and starting and Safari response time is disgraceful.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
20" Intel iMac 2.4 Ghz/3G Ram/320HD, Snow Leopard. PBook G4, 1.5Ghz/1.5 Ram/250 HD, Leopard 10.5.6.
As you have everything backed up, I would recommend you try a complete fresh install of your OS again, and then if that fails to solve it I would suggest that you may have a hard drive issue.
 

dtravis7


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MacMini M-1 MacOS Monterey, iMac 2010 27"Quad I7 , MBPLate2011, iPad Pro10.5", iPhoneSE
I take it the MBP was not always slow like this? What version of OSX is on it?

Did you say a new hard drive was installed or was that your backup drive?
 
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Shoeboat
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It was definitely a lot faster. I don't know what the guy in the shop did but looks like I may have been charged 1,000 Thai baht (32 USD) just to have the factory settings restored.

I've never done this before, but i'll try a disk utility repair. I can't re-install i-Life as I'm on holiday and the disk is somewhere at home back in Bangkok.
 
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Shoeboat
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Can anybody advise me what to do?

I don't want to perform any disk operation without knowing exactly what I am doing.

Laptop still performing like a 7 year old Powerbook G4 with 130 MB of space and 17 applications open. Remember this is a 6 month old MacBook Pro with well over 700 BG of free space. It can not play anything, any video, any Quicktime movie, any YouTube movie or iTune track with out struggling, pausing or stopping completely.

This is awful, please advise. I don't think the guy in the shop did much other than backup what he could and restore the factory settings.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
20" Intel iMac 2.4 Ghz/3G Ram/320HD, Snow Leopard. PBook G4, 1.5Ghz/1.5 Ram/250 HD, Leopard 10.5.6.
You don't say what version OS you are running, but anyway. If you don't have the install disc for the OS, you are going to be limited in what you can do, though you could run fsck (if you are running Leopard/Snow Leopard).
As a start though.
Go to Macintosh HD>Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility and open it.
Now, highlight your Macintosh HD in the left hand pane, and click the "repair permissions" tab and let it run though (no need to check them first, it does it anyway). When that finishes, click "verify disc". This will check if there's anything that needs fixing. You can then click "repair disc" if needed.
If this deosn't repair, you will need to run DU from the install disc instead, but if you don't have it, and you do get errors, then come back to us, and we can run you through fsck, to see if that helps.
 
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Shoeboat
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I'm on Snow Leopard, thanks for the instructions, I will try that. I don't want to install iLife, FCP, PS and my important applications until everything else is running smoothly.

Thanks again.
 

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