0
1
My 3yo macbook pro has been having these hiccups recently. I'm trying to figure out a way to diagnose the problem.
Brief specs: pre-retina MBP, SSD, running Win7. It's been working fine for years.
Here are the symptoms:
- hard drive access very slow sometimes
- brief hangs (where even the mouse doesn't move)
- general random slowness (for example when playing a game)
This has been my main machine, used for work and play for 3+ years. It has an SSD so I'm wondering if that's the cause (I know they're only rated for a certain amount of data transfer). I'd like to make sure before jumping the gun and buying a new SSD.
Any ideas on how to diagnose this? Something I can try to run/look at when it's slow?
EDIT: Screenshot
EDIT2: I experienced the complete hanging (including mouse movement) today when all the memory was used, assuming it was because it went into swap.
screenshot from SSDLife:
screenshot from CystalDiskMark:
radu
Posted 2015-07-06T21:34:58.650
Reputation: 131
Providing more information for the community would help to diagnose the problem. Consider looking through the Windows Event Viewer to see if any errors are being reported in regards to the drive itself. If nothing is being detected, consider that there may be a considerable amount of bloatware that you may have installed. Without this information, there is no way that we could pinpoint what the exact problem is. Consider uninstalling unneeded programs and removing privileges to start at boot. – Will.Beninger – 2015-07-07T00:37:01.440
boot to Win7, run this tool (http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html) and post a picture of it.
– magicandre1981 – 2015-07-07T04:17:28.630Screenshot posted. Checked event viewer and it's pretty clean. No bloatware as this is my devbox and I never installed any funky stuff on it (mostly dev sdks and steam games). – radu – 2015-07-07T07:14:03.627
this is starting to get interesting, have You recently changed/added RAM, or is it exactly in the same state that you bought it? – Divin3 – 2015-07-07T20:09:05.697
No @Divin3, I didn't change any hardware at all. Everything is stock. I didn't even change any peripherals lately. I'll try to run memtest tomorrow to see if there's any issue with the RAM, though it does look like disk access is what makes it slow. – radu – 2015-07-08T03:40:41.407
Ran trimcheck and it always comes up inconclusive, the data it reads is not zeroes, but it's always the same (yet different from what was written the first time) – radu – 2015-07-08T19:07:17.400
post pictures of AS SSD Benchmark: http://alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?cat_id=4&download_id=9 look if your SSD runs in the slower IDE mode.
– magicandre1981 – 2015-07-11T06:03:38.683@magicandre1981 you may be on to something - it says pciide bad. I'm searching now how to fix this, any ideas? – radu – 2015-07-13T20:56:17.020
@magicandre1981 it looks like it's tricky getting win7 on a mbp to work using AHCI. also while slower, this doesn't sound like my problem - I'm noticing these stuttering problems compared to before on my win7 installation (while AHCI would improve performance, this is not a overall performance problem). – radu – 2015-07-13T21:25:05.967
PCI is bad and can cause your slowdowns. can you boot to the firmware and change the setting? Before doing this, run this fix in Win7: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/922976
– magicandre1981 – 2015-07-14T04:16:09.577This is a macbook so it's quite a bit trickier to enable AHCI. I briefly tried yesterday resulting in a BSOD and recovering from a system restore point. – radu – 2015-07-14T13:40:05.383
you have to run the Fixit from the KB article in Windows while using IDE and next change the AHCI setting in the BIOS/UEFI! – magicandre1981 – 2015-07-17T04:19:56.773