Time Machine to the rescue

I'd bought my MacBook Pro less than 10 months ago, but had noticed that performance was incredibly slow. Waking the machine could easily involve applications being sluggish for a good 20 minutes or so, Chrome was forever giving me "Kill page" messages, and if I did take the option to reboot, I could be looking at least half an hour.

I'd read various articles which had not provided the answer, and had been initially reluctant to upgrade memory (as I had with my previous Mac) as it seemed much more inaccessible.

However, on re-checking this option, it looked less onerous, and that memory modules were reached merely by unscrewing the base of the machine. So that I did, armed with two 8GB RAM modules to replace my measly 2GB variants.

One minor issue - the module needs to be pushed in then angled down into its final position. The first module is a bit fiddly in this regard, and in the process I partially broke one of the spongy retainers.

Anyway, machine reassembled, time to boot.

And boot just hung and hung. I left it at 40 minutes and thought this was going to never happen.

So into Recovery mode, with Time Machine attached, and attempt a TM restore. About two hours later, it was complete.

Some adjustments were required - Mail had to be re-synced with the data files, and Super Duper needed an amend (as did Google Drive), but since then the difference has been marked. How much of this is down to the memory, and how much down to a reinstalled system, I don't know!