MacBook Pro Mid 2012 is very slow to respond to anything

"Hard Drives often get fragmented files which will slow the system down. You would need to use a tool which can see the fragmentation as well as fix it. I would first replace the SATA cable as you are about to do. I would place a strip of electricians tape across the uppercase where the cable crosses as the rough aluminum tends to wear the cable. Be careful in your placement as you don’t want sharp folds but smooth arcs. Many people think you can bend the cable any which way which is in fact not true! The foil conductors can be damaged as well as the shielding with the sharp folds.

After replacing the cable is when you want to run the defragmentation using a tool like this: Drive Genius 4. Even though the drive is mostly empty the scatter plot of the data blocks can cause the head assembly of the drive the need to cross one side to the other which slows the reading or writing.

Replacing the HDD to a SSD will also improve performance, which is a good direction to go as well. Frankly all laptops should use SSD’s today."

"Such slowdowns might be caused in my experience also by other possible hardware issues, battery included. You might try disconnecting the battery and run off the mains only..if that solves your issue you have your culprit.

Other sensors failures might throttle the CPU too..if you have an external bootable drive, try booting from that after disconnecting the internal hard disk cable and see what happens..if slowdown persists, you can rule out a cable failure and concentrate on other possible causes."

"Just making sure you have tried a SMC, PRAM and NVRAM reset. 99% of Mac problems can be solved by these handy tricks.

How to reset the SMC, PRAM and NVRAM on a Mac Laptop"

So did the SATA cable do the trick? I have exactly the same problem. minutes to load some webpages in chrome and safari...

"So many times, People are complaining about a slow performance issue due to several reasons.

The startup is loaded with lots of programs.Presence of the virus.Files are not organized or update required.

These are some basic reasons for slow performance. you should keep the minimum programs on the startup files.

Now run a good antivirus on your mac pc. it will clean up the mac and make your computer secure. if briefing, you may visit: why is my MacBook Pro running slow?"

90% of Macbook Pros with their original hard drive from this era are so slow upon first boot that I want to throw the thing into the garbage. I used to boot up and run malware scans and check the small things before getting into installing MacOS on the new SSD, but that is a huge waste of time. I would rather get the SSD up and running before and transfer user files with all their virus than trying to navigate this machine on a hard drive. These Macbook’s specs are not spellbinding, but the hard drives in these are a HUGE bottle neck…that’s why they are such amazing bang for buck if you know about the SSD upgrade.