I'm actually asking about my wife's MacBook Pro which I don't use very often. It's slowed down quite a bit recently and apparently before the update to El Capitan. Programs have started to take a long time to launch but once they have launched actually run fine. After booting up it will take about 45 seconds for Safari to even be usable. Spotlight also lags a lot and can't even keep up with typing, although it responds to 'escape' quickly.
I've watched the system monitor and even when programs are launching the CPU seems to be low with around 90% idle. It has 4GB of RAM and there always seems to be around 1.5Gb free.
I've attached the summary showing the hardware below. It doesn't have an SSD.
I've also run the Apple Hardware Test which took approximately an hour and nothing was reported from it.
From what I've read people have suggested upgrading the memory but since it doesn't seem to be running out of memory I would be surprised if this helped. There's also very little running and nothing user installed that is being launched in the Dock at start up.
Any help would be great and happy to provide any other stats needed.
Model Name: MacBook Pro
- Model Identifier: MacBookPro9,2
- Processor Name: Intel Core i5
- Processor Speed: 2.5 GHz
- Number of Processors: 1
- Total Number of Cores: 2
- L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
- L3 Cache: 3 MB Memory: 4 GB