Macbook is SUPER SLOW when opening anything...

William Carter

Estimable
Oct 24, 2014
1
0
4,510
Hi guys, needing some big time help. My son's Apple laptop has started to drag ass. Now the battery is dead it has been for about a year, he can only use it by keeping it plugged into the wall, but that has never been an issue before, it ran perfect 3 weeks ago.

Well, since he came back from visiting his step mom, it has been running SUPER SLOW, as in it takes FOREVER (5-10 min) anything (Finder, Chrome, etc). He tried a Factory Restore and reinstall (twice), to no avail. Now when he opens the Blizzard Launcher, it takes like 5 minutes for the Launcher to open. Then when he startes WoW, it takes anywhere from 10-30 minutes for the game to open, and even then, it runs at like 1 fps for about 30-60 minutes, before it either just stalls out, or sometimes fixes itself and runs right.

Any ideas on what could be wrong or how to fix? Thanks for your time, you guys have always been the best!

Laptop Stats:

MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2012)
Processor: 1.8 GHz Intel Core i5
Mem: 4GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536MB
OS: MacOS High Sierra ver. 10.13.6
 
Oct 2, 2018
3
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10
I am guessing two issues: (mainly hardware)
1. I/O Cable: It could be the malfunctioning of the cable that leads to the slowness of the machine
2. Keyboard: It could be that the SHIFT key had stuck and force the computer to boot into Safe Mode
 
Install Malwarebytes and run a scan.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/mac/

Open Activity Monitor. In Applications > Utilities. Check Memory Pressure in the Memory tab and CPU usage in the CPU tab.

Given the specs. I'd say it is time to upgrade to an SSD and upgrade the RAM. I'd max out the RAM at 16GB. So, you don't have to do it again.