What Was Happening
A customer from Wandsworth SW18 brought in a MacBook Pro 13-inch 2012 (A1278) that had become difficult to use. Boot time had grown to over ten minutes. Apps took minutes to open after clicking. The system beach-balled (the spinning wait cursor) regularly during normal tasks like browsing or opening documents. The customer had owned the machine for several years and assumed it just needed more memory, or that it was simply too old to be useful.
The machine had not had any professional attention since purchase.
Our Diagnosis
We ran a full health check across the system: hardware diagnostics, storage assessment, SMART data analysis, memory test, startup programme audit, and temperature logs.
Storage: The internal 500GB hard drive was at 97% capacity — 485GB used, 15GB free. macOS requires free space to write system caches, handle virtual memory, and perform background tasks. At under 5% free space, the system was constantly struggling to find room to operate.
Drive health: SMART data from the hard drive showed reallocated sectors — areas of the disk surface that had failed and been mapped out to spare sectors. This is a reliable early indicator of physical drive degradation. The drive had not yet failed, but the trajectory was clear. A conventional hard drive showing reallocated sector counts in this pattern typically fails within weeks to months.
Startup items: macOS Activity Monitor and the login items list revealed 14 applications set to launch at startup, many of them background processes the customer had no awareness of — cloud sync clients, software updaters, and trial applications installed years ago that were still loading automatically.
Memory: The 8GB RAM was adequate for the customer’s usage and was not a contributing factor.
The primary problems were the failing drive and the full storage, with the startup overload adding further load on an already struggling system.
How We Fixed It
We discussed the findings with the customer and provided a written summary before starting any repair work. The customer approved the following work:
SSD replacement: The conventional hard drive was replaced with a 500GB solid-state drive. The old drive was imaged before removal to preserve all data. The image was transferred to the SSD, and the machine was tested to confirm all files, applications, and system preferences were intact.
Storage clearance: Working with the transferred image on the SSD, we identified the largest space consumers — primarily duplicate files, a large Downloads folder with years of accumulated files, and several application installers that had been downloaded and never deleted. With the customer’s guidance on what to keep, storage was reduced to approximately 280GB used, bringing the drive to 56% capacity.
Startup items: We removed 11 of the 14 startup items — those the customer confirmed they did not use regularly or deliberately. Three items (a cloud backup client and two productivity apps) were kept.
The Result
Boot time dropped from over ten minutes to under thirty seconds. Apps opened promptly. The beach-ball spinning cursor, which had become near-constant, disappeared. The customer collected the MacBook the following morning.
Equally important: the customer now had a written summary of what was found, what was done, and what to watch for going forward — including the note that SMART failure indicators had been present, which explained why the drive was replaced rather than just cleared.
Why a Health Check Is Different from a Specific Repair
A specific repair starts from a known fault — “the screen is broken” or “it won’t charge.” A health check starts from a symptom and works backward to find all causes. In this case, a customer who came in saying “it’s slow” could have been told “you need more RAM” by a less thorough assessment. The actual problems — a failing drive and full storage — are different, more urgent, and would have resulted in data loss within weeks.
The written report is also part of the service: a clear, plain-English summary of what was tested, what was found, and what each finding means in practice. Customers leave understanding their machine, not just having had it worked on.
Prevention Tips
- Keep storage below 80% capacity on any laptop — macOS performance degrades significantly above 90% and system instability becomes likely above 95%
- Check drive SMART health using a free tool like DriveDx once a year — conventional hard drives in older MacBooks are the most common source of sudden, unrecoverable failure
- Review your startup items periodically: open System Settings → General → Login Items and remove anything you don’t recognise or no longer use
- Back up with Time Machine or another method, especially if your Mac is more than three years old — the failure profile for laptop hard drives increases sharply after year three
Local Help in Wandsworth SW18
We offer PC and Mac health checks at our Putney workshop for customers across Wandsworth SW18 and surrounding areas. Free collection is available from SW18 so you don’t need to travel to drop the machine off. The health check includes a written findings summary in plain English — no jargon, no unnecessary repair recommendations.
Related Services
- PC & Mac Health Check — full diagnostic service for any laptop or desktop
- PC & Mac Health Check in Wandsworth — local service for SW18
- SSD Upgrade — replace a slow or failing hard drive with a solid-state drive
More Case Studies
- MacBook Air hard drive replacement in Streatham SW16 — another aging MacBook with storage problems
- Compaq Presario hard drive replacement in Wandsworth — hard drive failure in a Windows laptop from the same area
- Sony VAIO internet and battery issues in Putney — multiple faults diagnosed and resolved in a single session