Speed of Macbook Pro (question)

I have a mid-2012 Macbook Pro 13” (2,5 ghz, 4GB Ram, 500 GB Hard Disk), which is my first Mac, and there are 2 problems I have encountered:


1. When closing the lid at night, and opening up the Mac the next morning takes around 20+ seconds for it to get responsive (including trackpad). For those 20+ seconds I see the time still being indicated when I closed it (23:45 pm for instance) and then it gets back to the current time (08:15 am) after 20+ seconds. During these 20+ seconds the Mac is totally unresponsive (it

NB: I am aware that there are settings to change regarding sleeping mode/hybernating mode, but regardless of the changes made (even with a sudo command) it does not change this problem)

Any suggestions?

2. When having only a few programs active (Mail and Outlook and Safari) I am trying to open Opera. And it takes 15 bounces (!) before Opera is opening. Is this normal? It happens also to other programs when, to me, the loading time seems to excessive. Is there any way to figure out what is restraining the system? (I use the ”correct permission” thingy on a regular basis). Is it just me being to demanding, or are such program start-up times normal?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Have a look at Activity Monitor and click on the system memory tab to see if your ram has been gobbled up - OSX seems to like ram a lot.
If it is try a reboot and see if things improve.

thanks for the quick reply


Below a screenshot

Yep, not much free ram there (if I understand these things correctly).
When did you last reboot it? I think a reboot will show a big improvement. Though I'm definitely no expert :-(

Doing a reboot now....

it now takes 6 bounces before Opera opens (instead of 15 bounces)

Hmm, that doesn't sound too good, but it's better How is your ram now, in Activity Monitor? How do other apps respond?
There could be an underlying problem but I'm afraid I'm not knowledgable enough to make any suggestions as to what that might be :-(

The reason the restart helped is because the Activity Monitor picture you included (thanks!) shows that you are likely to be leaving programs open that you aren't using, which takes up resources when you only have 4GB of RAM as it appears you have.

Get in the habit of closing programs you're not using, and/or upgrade the RAM.

i always figured 4gb ddr3 was good, especially on osx since its much lighter than windows

i have the same mac as you OP - how much max ram do these support? 8 gb? if i took it to the apple store how much would it cose for an upgrade? im scared to do itmyself.

A mid-2012 should support 8GB, and it's not an expensive upgrade at all. The Apple Store can do that for you, but may charge a fee for their time as well as for the RAM. You might get an estimate from a non-Apple Store Apple Authorized Dealer, it could be cheaper to do that way.

According to Mactracker and OWC a mid 2012 MBP can accept up to 16 GB of memory. That would be 2 x 8 GB modules. A bit expensive but is certainly doable.

But to answer the original question, the probably reason why shutdown takes so long is because you are leaving programs open, and the Mac has to write the contents of RAM to the hard drive in order to resume when it's booted back up.

As I said earlier, quitting programs before shutdown should dramatically reduce the time needed for it to do this.

thank you all for the comments and information

**** i need to upgrade to 8 gb already?? i just got this thing and 4gb is outdated ? seems to run fine so far for me

Sento said:

**** i need to upgrade to 8 gb already?? i just got this thing and 4gb is outdated ? seems to run fine so far for me

Click to expand...

If it's running fine...then no need to upgrade.

- Nick

I also had this ”CPU LED” thing running at the top bar. It something hang when wanting to shut down, so I got rid of it all together.

I found out in fact that this CPU LED program was actually causing the problem. I just opened my Macbook Pro (after I closed it down last night) and it woke up instantly!

Strange. I use that same app and it doesnt give me any problems but if it fixed it then great!

As mentioned earlier, a change in behavior on how you manage programs (ie, shut them down yourself by truly quitting them when not in use or at least prior to engaging shutdown) will also make a big difference.

I come from the days when RAM was a precious and expensive commodity, so I got in the habit of shutting down most programs I wasn't immediately using as I worked. This habit has stood me in good stead over the years even though I have 8GB on this machine now.