Is your Mac becoming increasingly slow and lags at the strangest times?
We spoke to a independent Macintosh technician over in the United Kingdom to give us the inside information you can’t always find speaking to your local genius bar.
Before you put your trusty laptop out to pasture, check and see if it can be resolved with these five common Mac solutions, and even if not there’s still hope.
Some vintage models of MacBook and iMacs are able to have their ram upgraded or better still have the standard hard drive replaced with a SSD.
Johnathan over at Mac Repair Nottingham which is one of the oldest running independents in the UK says that many vintage Mac’s can be speeded up to run up to 20x faster than when they was new!
The inside word is Apple put a lot of cheap HSTC hard drives in the computers between 2011 and 2017 so this could be a reason for such a slow mac.
But before give these a try.
Blank Screen
A blue or black screen that stays is a sign that your computer has froze at the log in or when you’re in the midst of opening an app. You can force the Mac to restart by pressing and holding the power button for about six seconds. If the problem doesn’t go away, boot to Safe Mode, then remove any apps that could be causing the issue.
Gray Screen
A gray screen that displays the Mac logo in the middle means that an important software update has failed. Here, you can restart and open your Mac in Safe Mode, then complete any pending updates to your macOS software. For good measure, run the Disk Utility tool to see if there are any disk issues.
MacBook Keeps Shutting Down
The first thing you should do is to see if the laptop’s battery is still working. Once you eliminate this possibility and the Mac keeps shutting down, this could be a different thing altogether.
Restart the computer with the power button and wait for the operating system to completely load. Then, do a proper shutdown. You may also reset the SMC, or System Management Controller so hardware processes get a reset, e.g., sleep mode, battery charging and others. if these steps don’t work, it’s best to bring it to a professional for a reliably quick resolution.
Unresponsive App
A non-responding Mac may indicate an app problem. The whole computer may freeze, and may not even allow you to exit or quit the app.
Open the ‘Force Quit’ menu by hitting the Escape-Option-Command. Highlight the non-responsive app, then choose ‘quit’
Spinning Beach Ball
Slowdowns can be resolved by finding out the program that could be causing it.
Open Activity Monitor and see how much each app is affecting your Mac’s resource. Quit the programs you’re not using, or uninstall it if you don’t need it anymore.
Thank you to Johnathan at Mac repair UK, a former genius employee for the insight.
