Macbook Pro very slow

Hi, I have a MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2011).

I've had this macbook for little over a year now for school, but I always questioned why my macbook was slow all the time. I've had bootcamp installed on it and used it way more than the mac os, and recently deleted the partition. I compared my macbook with other classmates who has the same laptops and their macbooks are fast and react much better than mine. This is my first macbook, and I did some research and things like upgrade ram, empty hard disk space are not the solutions as my classmates have same ram, but run much faster, and I have 400GB of free space. I would appreciate any help you can give me. Should I take it to the apple store? I have extended apple care.

Thanks.

You were wise to buy the extended Apple care but why don't you try a few things before making an appointment with the genius bar? (It would also help if you mentioned which version of OS X you're running.)

Download the free OnyX maintenance and cleanup tool from here. Install it, read the help file, and then run it in auto mode. And by the way, this is the only maintenance and cleanup tool we recommend. Avoid others as most are Snake Oil. Let us know if that helps.

I am having this very problem too. I've run OnyX and fixed disk permissions several times, even run Dr. Web Light to see if I have any viruses. Nothing has helped, it's really slow all the time and takes 7-10 min to load any program. Please help!


Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro9,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.5 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Boot ROM Version: MBP91.00D3.B08
SMC Version (system): 2.2f41
Serial Number (system): C02J6UCPDTY3
Hardware UUID: 3353AA94-0A22-5EE0-AC60-363AEFF10140
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Enabled