2011 macbook pro problems. Help appreciated

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Ablar

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I'm a windows man, so if any of this sounds too stupid I apologize.

When I began dental school 4 years ago the school kindly charged me $1800 and gave me a 2011 13" macbook pro (i5 model w/ 4 gigs of RAM). Not my choice, but it's what I have. The school had a 4 year hardware support agreement with Apple (fortunately) and I had the HDD replaced twice in those 4 years. The last time around they recovered my data and updated my OS to Mavericks without consulting me first (I was well aware of the havoc Mavericks had caused my classmates when they all updated and wanted nothing to do with it).
Now it was certainly no speed demon before this all happened, but since then it is just painfully slow. Opening a small word document can take over a minute with no other programs running. Switching between two programs like chrome and word typically results in the colorful spinning wheel popping up for a good 20 seconds. Even typing something inside of safari often results in a few seconds of lag while it catches up with my typing.
I don't believe I have any sort of malware on it because this is how it was behaving straight back from Apple. Does anybody have any suggestions on what I can do to get some performance back from this? I'm honestly about to give up and just put windows 7 on it and give up on osx completely.
 

Titillating

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Do you happen to know what kind of HDD they put in there? Switching over to an SSD, if it isn't already using one, might help with some of the loading and lagging issues you're having. Could also try downgrading to an older version of OSX, although I'm not sure what Apple's policy on that is.
 

luna74

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You can make a 2011 i5 MBP go lightening fast if you're willing to take the time and spend the money to upgrade its hard drive to a solid state drive, and I know for a fact that the mid-2010 i5 macbook pro can at the very least support 8gb of RAM so you should upgrade your RAM as well (shoot for a high end ddr3)
 
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