macbook pro with el capitan non stop beach balling/lag

[mymacisbonkers]

Hello, I am running a early 2011 macbook pro (on el capitan) that was fine until a few weeks ago. I have constant lag/beachballing symbol,with playing itunes, login, i cant even type a document in pages without it freezing. Heck even loading this was a pain.

I am posting for opinions on how to fix this, should i back up my must have things to an external and wipe it clean? reinstall osx? i have had it for years and it has never been like this. Thanks in advance for your help

ps i foolishly turned on filevault and its 98% done but stuck on estimating time remaining..could that be a cause?

 

[Zazoh]

I had a 15" MBP (Early 2011 Model) The thing that always slowed it down, was the hard drive. If it was near full, or if there was heavy activity to it.

While not certain, I believe you are on the right track to suspect FileVault ... What if you went into energy preferences and then indicated that while on power -- don't sleep the HD, then shut down all running apps and leave it alone for a day or night, I wonder if the FileVault will finish then. I've also read FileVault will slow down computer anyway, not sure how it is on SSD, I'm not doing any secret decoder ring type stuff, so don't need it.

I've also hear that model of MBP can have the HD swapped out for a SSD and that will make the computer more snappy again like it was when we bought it. (I've since sold mine)

 

[satcomer]

Hello, I am running a early 2011 macbook pro (on el capitan) that was fine until a few weeks ago. I have constant lag/beachballing symbol,with playing itunes, login, i cant even type a document in pages without it freezing. Heck even loading this was a pain.

I am posting for opinions on how to fix this, should i back up my must have things to an external and wipe it clean? reinstall osx? i have had it for years and it has never been like this. Thanks in advance for your help

ps i foolishly turned on filevault and its 98% done but stuck on estimating time remaining..could that be a cause?

You need the free application EtreCheck. It will show you if you have a trojan, old hacky incompatible files, old files lurking around. The best part the program will show the file path to manually delete this old files!

I bet you have done really old files still in your system taking up resources!