MacbookPro8,2 UI lag on 10.13.6

[hellothere231]

Hey there. I've recently upgraded my old early 2011 Macbook Pro 15" with a Samsung SSD, in order to breathe new life into the machine. It's definitely more usable, but I'm still getting pretty bad UI lag, most noticeably on the Dock's magnification effect and with scrolling in Finder/Safari/Google Chrome. It's got an i7 clocked at 2.00 GHz and 4GB of dual channel DDR3 1333MHz ram; is this just too slow for modern use or is there anything I can do to make things run smoother; perhaps downgrade? Thanks in advance.

 

[Aea]

You can disable a lot of the UI effects: https://www.defaults-write.com/speed-up-macos-high-sierra/

 

[hellothere231]

You can disable a lot of the UI effects: https://www.defaults-write.com/speed-up-macos-high-sierra/

Thanks man, just did that and also switched back to Safari, getting a bit better performance but stuff like the Dock and Finder lag is still there. Am I just expecting too much out of a 7 year old computer or?

 

[Aea]

Possibly, but I helped somebody re-image their 2012 MBP recently and that thing ran just fine. If you can get an RAM upgrade cheaply then it's probably worth looking into. But that machine should perform just fine for simple tasks, maybe look into re-installing the OS?

 

[ericj2109]

I still use an early 2011 with 8gb of ram daily and it works fine. I'm even babying the AMD GPU by forcing the integrated graphics and I don't get any stuttering. I would think the ram is your bottleneck; my wife's old MBA with 4gb of ram had delays and stuttering and I think the only thing keeping it usable was the SDD swap. I would check the activity monitor for memory usage but I can easily hit 4gb with just a few browser windows open.

 

[DeltaMac]

The 4GB of RAM could be a bit light.
Your 2011 15-inch CAN be upgraded to 16GB. Don't know if that is worth doing with a 7-year old system, but 8GB can certainly tell you if more RAM can help in your use.

 

[hellothere231]

Possibly, but I helped somebody re-image their 2012 MBP recently and that thing ran just fine. If you can get an RAM upgrade cheaply then it's probably worth looking into. But that machine should perform just fine for simple tasks, maybe look into re-installing the OS?

The High Sierra install is only a few days old so I don't think reinstalling would benefit me much, but from the other replies I think I'll try to upgrade the system to at least 8GB of RAM to see if it'll benefit. Thanks.