Macbook pro mid 2010 lifespan

Hi there,

After upgrading to Yosemite my mid 2010 MBP (with a 60GB OCZ-AGILITY3 SSD instead of the standard HD) has started showing signs of strain for the very first time. Especially when working with large pdfs and my usual brace of programs it gets laggy when switching between programs, using Mission Control or Application Windows.
This has never happened before, smooth as a dream until the upgrade.

I assume this just generally has to do with the aging power of my macbook and will only become more pronounced as time passes and more upgrades come. Should I bother buying more RAM? Or will that only prolong the death rattle? I guess if getting more RAM (would a bigger SSD also help? I generally have about 15GB free space left) will give me another year lag free I'd consider it a worthwhile investment.

Thanks for the help
VR

How much ram (memory) do you have installed? How many programs do you typically have open at one time?

Since it use dot work quite well I suspect that as the DDD files up the OS is running out of space for its swap files. 15 GB is about one fourth of the drive (good) but not really a lot of space.

Hi, thanks for the reply. I still have the same 4GB of RAM it came with and I usually have half a dozen to a dozen programs running, but often with multiple pdfs and text documents open as well.

I'm not sure which version of the OS you have but here's an idea that should provide some insight.

1. Reboot the Mac so you are starting form scratch.
2. Open Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder) and look at the memory tab. Look at either page in / page out totals or swap used)
3. Now go about business as usual until things slow down then look at the swap totals again. Post the results and we'll have a better idea of how much adding more memory would help.

I suspect additional memory would help though. That's quite a bit going on with only 4 GB of memory.

Some folks are saying that Yosemite works better with 8gig of ram.

- Nick

And I think a 60GB hard drive is pushing things more than a little. For me Yosemite with no music or photos uses 44GB of hard drive, plus almost 1GB for Recovery.

And as with a platter drive many folk suggest 20% free space in order to see it run at capacity:-


http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2205801


http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1909054/free-space-leave-232gb-ssd-gaming.html

yea you need 8 gig's of ram i am running both maverick and yosemite and yosemite on 8 gig's of ram still isn't enough ram to run the machine i am wondering why apple sells a 4 gig of ram mac mini if yosemite eats 3.00 gigs of it

Hi there,

I think I may have jumped the gun somewhat. After a weekend's work it has shown no signs of strain and a swap of 59MB.

I think the cause may just have been a couple of strange ocr-ed scans preview had difficulty dealing with.

Sorry to have unnecessarily taken up your time like this.

Cheers
VR