Chosen Solution
I have a MacBook Pro that has been working awesome up until this year. I bought it in either 2011 or 2012. This year the computer has become slow and the fan constantly runs making the computer base hot. I am thinking about replacing and upgrading the hard drive. Any other suggestions? Also when I replace the hard drive, how hard is it to load iOS system again without cloning the old drive?
I highly doubt that the issue has anything to do with the hard drive. If you open up “activity monitor”, and look under the CPU tab, are there any processes that take up a high percentage of the CPU? If so, then an erase and reinstall of the operating system will likely solve the issue. On the other hand, this could be related to a hardware issue caused by a faulty sensor, since a faulty sensor can cause the fan to spin like crazy, and the computer to lag a lot. However, the laptop shouldn’t be hot at all if there is a sensor issue.
My mid-2010 Macbook Pro had the same problem. I replaced the RAM (to 8GB) and hard drive (to SSD) at the same time, so I can’t tell you which one did it, but it’s much better now. It still tends to overheat if I’m running active content in a few tabs in Chrome, but not nearly as much as before. If you get a new drive, boot from recovery mode to format it and install macOS, and then migrate your files over. It will take several hours to finish depending on how much you have on your hard drive.
