UKC

I am a numpty when it comes to the fundamentals of computers

I have a 2011 15" MacBook Pro, 2GHz Intel i7, 4Gb RAM, running Sierra 10.12.6

It has a 500Gb hard drive with 150Gb free space.

I mostly use this machine for web browsing and editing RAW photo files in Photoshop. Photos are kept on an external drive (WD MyPassport Ultra, 1Tb I think). Occasionally might stream a movie or watch a DVD on it, and use iTunes. Nothing too demanding there. 

I bought the MacBook second hand about 18 months ago and have mostly been happy with it. 

I have not taken care with "housekeeping" etc. 

It's been gradually slowing down and slowing down and slowing down, becoming nearly unworkable this morning. 

I cleared a load of stuff off the desktop (just downloaded images and screenshots that I lazily dumped onto there) and did a hard reset, not sure if this has helped, all seems a bit faster now but I am not confident that that is all that I needed to do. 

I never have more things open simultaneously than just Safari, iTunes and Photoshop. I don't set this thing on onerous rendering or video tasks.

I continually have Avast popping up and telling me to run a sweep and to subscribe to them. I assume this is something that crept in via spam, but I suppose I do actually need to do a virus check and maybe some other consolidation of cached files or whatever the terminology is. 


What's a recommended virus checker? Free is nice but I don't mind paying a bit.

What else can I do to speed this thing up?

I have, lying around somewhere, a 250Gb Samsung SSD but being a numpty, I am no good at swapping these things out and slightly scared of the process - paranoid that I'll lose my Photoshop etc!

There is nothing particularly important on the current HD, just duplicate pictures and my iTunes

Any constructive advice appreciated, thanks!

4GB of extra RAM and the SSD will keep you going for a good while. The spinning disk is quite old. I have done this change a few times on older machines and it has been fine. The biggest issue with these machines is failure of the onboard discrete GPU. If you are lucky you have the model without this.

You can clone your hard disk before use using Carbon Copy Cloner to preserve everything going forward onto a small 500GB USB external. 

You might need to buy a new screwdriver

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Unibody+Early+2011+Hard+Dr...

Photoshop will be your biggest challenge if you do not have all the gear to re-install this. Changing disk will require re-authentication. If you bought the machine with that software on, you might be stuck. PS can be rented from Adobe by the month or year if needed. You may need to run a more up to date OS to do this. 

I agree with Steve - extra RAM is a worthwhile addition, plus fitting that SSD. I did this with my 2011 MacBook Pro and it was  a significant improvement. Costs vary according to market vagaries but I think I spent about £95 at the time. I ran into the problem with the processor and ended up buying a 2012 version as a replacement. The extra RAM wasn't wasted - I just moved it into the new machine.

Before you do that you might want to investigate your existing setup a bit more. You can check for adware for a start - I've used MalwareBytes in the past. You can run EtreCheck to get a very comprehensive report on your Mac's condition. Download anything from the official sites though. 

Cloning your existing setup is straightforward using something like CCC as Steve says, except that you've got more stuff on your existing hard drive than will fit on the new one. I managed to cock up installing an SSD on my old Mac Mini by not noticing that! But I did do it successfully for my laptop so even an idiot can cope in the end...

Linux.

Why? Not a solution at all if you want to use OS X. Just trolling.

Good advice - replacing the hard drive  in these is really easy - 

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Unibody+Early+2011+Hard+Dr...

The newer versions of Apple's OS are very drive intensive and not at all optimized to run on anything but an SSD. With 4G of ram, it's probably swapping ram backwards and forwards a lot, which will be painful, particularly if the drive is a 5400 rpm model

Thanks all. I am not sure what is taking up 350Gb of HD space, I'll have to check that! I should be able to work with 250Gb SSD. Photoshop came loaded onto the machine so that could be an issue but maybe this is the push to get me to go to Lightroom or subscribe properly to Photoshop. 

I have run MalwareBytes, it was clean. Also Onyx. 
The biggest change I saw was after clearing the files off the desktop. 
After running Onyx, things slowed down alarmingly (at least navigating to web pages) but a reset sorted that. 

I'll have to be brave and try the SSD. 

This little app called "Disk Inventory X" is very handy for figuring out what's using your storage:

http://www.derlien.com/

Forgot to mention - it’s worth running Disk Utility, resetting the SMC and zapping the NVRAM while you’re spring cleaning. Probably won’t directly affect your problem of course.

A frequent "thing" is keeping a lot of files on the desktop and windows open - all those little icons have to be redrawn every time they are exposed. This used to be very disk/cpu intensive - I doubt it has got better with the modern software bloat trend (and I'm dating myself here).

I'm as guilty of this as anyone, but some people are horrendous offenders. 

For something chip and reliable, 240GB SanDisk SSD is heard to beat.

I'm typing this on a mid 2009 mac book pro which is way faster than my 3 year old Dell laptop and just wanted to repeat the advice about the SSD, it makes all the difference to how it runs, it was pretty painful to use before and since I've changed the hard disk to a SSD it's great.

I don't have a virus checker installed because they seem to really slow down machines, I'm just careful about what I download and which websites I go to, although that's not full proof (although nor is a virus checker). 

I also have a 2011 macbook pro. I swapped out the optical drive (because who really uses CDs or DVDs these days) for an SSD, so now I have the system files on the SSD and all my photos, videos etc on the old hard disk. This makes startup super fast, and still gives me loads of storage. Would recommend. 

Thanks all, some sound and clear advice throughout. 

Regarding the "optical drive", isn't the HDD something entirely separate from the CD/DVD player?
I'll have a go at replacing the HDD with my SSD but I'd like to retain the CD/DVD player for ripping CDs to iTunes. 

Yup. The HDD is separate so you can swap it out and have a SSD and still keep your optical drive.

If you don't use the optical drive then you can swap that out for an additional drive but you don't have to if you still use it (Mine's not swapped although last time I checked the optical drive was failing to read anything anyway...)