MacBook Pro often unresponsive in Mountain Lion. Should I upgrade to Mavericks?

Question

Hi, I upgraded to Mountain Lion from Snow Leopard about a month ago. Since then, my MacBook Pro has often become unresponsive, giving me the spinning beach ball -- or doing nothing at all -- when I have just a few applications running. (Typically, these may be Mail, Safari, iTunes and sometimes Adobe Lightroom 5.) I have a 2011 MacBook Pro with a 2.7GHz Intel Core i7 and 4GB of factory-installed RAM. It was a snappy performer in Snow Leopard. I'm wondering now if I should try upgrading to Mavericks, and perhaps get a boost from the memory compression. Or will this potentially take whatever problems are slowing me down now and make them worse? Interested to hear your opinions, thanks.

Answer 1

Try booting into the Safe Mode using your normal account.  Disconnect all peripherals except those needed for the test. Shut down the computer and then power it back up. Immediately after hearing the startup chime, hold down the shift key and continue to hold it until the gray Apple icon and a progress bar appear. The boot up is significantly slower than normal. This will reset some caches, forces a directory check, and disables all startup and login items, among other things. When you reboot normally, the initial reboot may be slower than normal.
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