I have a slow Macbook Pro

Question

Hi guys,
I hope you all are doing well. I have a slow Mac, it is a 10.8.3, 2.5 Intel Core, 4GB. I bought this brand new from Apple. For the last year, this laptop has been slow to the point where I think it would be cheaper to move back to the PC and just buy a new PC every 2-3 years.
The problems I have are the following:
1. Web pages are loading up slow. The PC loads them faster on the same network.
     - I have tried clearing the cache and ran Onyx as well. I used Safari and Chrome
      - I also ran ClamXav and no high level virus pops up. My former boss did have a virus on his where when he would show up with his laptop at the office and      the internet would slow down. Genius bar was no help, but our help desk found a virus that was killing our bandwidth. He downloaded a lot of movies from      Bittorrent. So I was thinking I may have the same problme. But I am not sure if ClamVav is advanced enough to find these types of viruses. And Genius      Bar could not find any problem.
2. Loading programs take a while, espcially with Word and Excel. The PC loads faster.
     - I ran the disk utilies to verify disk and the permissions
     - I even formatted the Hard Drive and reinstalled the software.
3. Sometimes when I play a embedded video, the whole screen turns black and would take 30 second or so for the screen to reappear and continue with the clip. This problem started today.
4. The hard disk clicks once in a while. Back when I was on the PC, this was a sign that the HD needs to be replaced
     - I would run the utility to see if the hard disk was fine. About 5 months ago it said the disk was damaged. I have been rerunning once every two months      since and so far that error has not reappeared.
I use this laptop just to check email and surf the web. I do not do any graphic design so do not know why these simple functions are a headache. I do watch movies as well on the laptop.  I have run the Activity Monitor and nothing is really eating the the CPU and I have a decent amount of free HD space.
I did take the laptop to Apple and they said the laptop seemed sluggish and when they did an overnight test they could not find any problems. I have has the video board changed out a few times because sometimes when I would use Safari, the screen would have a "white snow screen" for a split second from I jump from the homepage to another website. This stopped when I upgraded to the recent OS.
Sometime the Apple tech would say that the corrupt video board would also affect the wireless connection thus the slow internet. But for this laptop, I think I changed the video board around 3 times, which is disappointing for a laptop that costs around $2,000 versus a $600 PC. I do use this laptop everday and carry it around each day until the PC laptops in the past. So it has been my workhorse for over 3+ years.
I really do not think I need more memory since my laptop use is not demanding. I may be that the hard drive needs to be changed out or some type of virus eating up my performance. If the hard drive, I was thinking of getting a SSD.
Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

First, back up all data immediately, as your boot drive might be failing.
There are a few other possible causes of generalized slow performance that you can rule out easily.
Reset the System Management Controller.
If you have many image or video files on the Desktop with preview icons, move them to another folder.
If applicable, uncheck all boxes in the iCloud preference pane.
Disconnect all non-essential wired peripherals and remove aftermarket expansion cards, if any.
Check your keychains in Keychain Access for excessively duplicated items.
If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out this step.
Launch the Console application in the same way you launched Activity Monitor. Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Select the 50 or so most recent entries in the log. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V). You're looking for entries at the end of the log, not at the beginning.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some personal information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting. That should be easy to do if your extract is not too long.