MacBook running extremely slow

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Okay so,
I have a Mid-2012 13" MacBook Pro. I can barely write normally from here, the typing keeps on freezing as many other features in the system (apps, basic tasks, etc)
Specs:
8GB RAM DDR3 1600MHz
1GB Intel HD Graphics 4000
Intel Core i7 @ 2.6GHz
750GB Internal HDD

The macbook was used from 2012 to the last week, it had almost a full hard drive and it was running as slow as ****, but we assumed it was the low HDD space left that was causing it.
Backed it up (we got a 15" new macbook from the year so I use the 13" one now) and started with Command + R, used the Mavericks installation that comes with the macbook and formatted the hard drive and ran a clean install on Mavericks.
Everything went perfect, I created my user and logged in. From the first moment I noticed it was still as slow as before the format, so I waited until indexing was finished. The problem persisted. I get the spinning wheel like every one or two minutes, when browsing it takes a lot of time, sometimes you can't scroll on pages. Everything is just so slow.

Checked the activity monitor, shows a maximum CPU usage with apps running of 25% (75% CPU is idle). The RAM used by programs is about 1.5GB but I generally have less than 4GB free (I know that Mavericks makes use of free RAM because unused RAM is wasted RAM, but to the point of leaving me at 250MB free RAM and the computer running slower than a toaster seems kinda stupid). I'm holding this thing with MemoryClean but it makes no difference.

Tried resetting NVRAM and I think I reset the SMC too, no results.

I am considering bringing it to Apple so they can see what the **** is going on, but I'd like to know if the issue can be solved from home.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Jose.
 

pigoo3

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You did a heck of a lot of great troubleshooting there!:)

Another thing you can try is. If you happen to have a bootable external hard drive. Boot the computer from it…and see if that helps.

About the only thing left to consider is…maybe the hard drive is failing.

- Nick
 
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Okay, thanks for the quick response :)

Will test it with an external drive and see what's going on, post the results here.

Thanks!

-Jose
 
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I think this is kinda hilarious since I've been a couple of days trying to figure out the problem and now I think I have a little more information to give.

I always checked my activity monitor, getting the results above, but turns out I left it open and started to browse, got two massive slowdowns and then it became a little more responsive.
I don't know why did I go to the activity monitor (it had been open all the time) and for the first time it showed a CPU usage graph. At least I hadn't seen it before. Here is the image, only browsing (no data streaming or graphics/cpu demanding tasks) done during the period in the graph.
Any ideas of why would this happen?
RrBjOsw.png


Cheers!
 

pigoo3

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Here is the image, only browsing (no data streaming or graphics/cpu demanding tasks) done during the period in the graph.
Any ideas of why would this happen?

Jose. I'm not seeing anything special in that Activity Monitor image (maybe I'm missing something). CPU use is only a little above 10% (89% idle).

- Nick
 
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Ok guys, I don't know how I fixed this but this is what I did:

- Shut Down
- Reset NVRAM and SMC according to the following links:
NVRAM: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063
SMC: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295
- Booted in Recovery Mode (Command + R) and verified all partitions with the Disk Utility
- Reboot
- Booted in Safe Mode (the MacBook was slightly faster)
- Reboot (Normal boot)
- Problem solved.

Thanks for your time!

I leave you the thread on the apple support forums:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/28189358
 

pigoo3

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Congrats on solving things.:)

- Nick
 

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Congrats on solving the problem. That's a good bit of troubleshooting there.
 

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