Sky Coning

That makes total sense! I can't believe how cheap those RAMS are compared to apples. This time around I did buy the 16GB on my new mac book pro. Im not sure what my options were in 2012 as I didn't care lol. I didn't start photography until about 6 months later, and only had the program for elements for a few years until I upgraded to CC in 2014. So this all makes much more sense now. Had I known then that it would be that easy and affordable to change the ram, I would have started there and saved $100 on a hard drive cable I probably didn't need. Oh well. Live and learn, right? Thank you so much for all your help. I will invest in the new RAM and report back with my findings!

Does the RAM over time become less “useable” for lack of better words? I guess I’m just confused how everything works fine for 6 years and then in the course of a couple days just completely goes south. I will definitely look into upgrading the RAM. Maybe that and wiping it out and starting over will make it useable again.

I will say though, something I forgot to mention, and I'm not sure that this could even be a legit issue. But I did have to go in and adjust the MB I was letting photoshop use to about 85% to make it functional.

I did this try that I even went through and deleted a bunch of photoshop tools and things that I no longer used and other tid bit things that I didn't need from both the computer and the hard drives. I deleted the guest account to be sure it wasn't something on there since I never used it anyways. That's why I ended up just buying a new one and tossed it aside to mess with later, because I was so frustrated and getting really backed up on editing.

Is this only when it's connected? In other words, should I not be utilizing my Mac when the external is attached? Only using it when I need to move files?

So, the reason that they replaced the cable in the first place, was because they couldn't find any other reason that it would be running so slowly. My memory and ram was vitally empty because I don't keep anything on my editing computer. I keep it all on externals. I will definitely try all your suggestions and see what happens though! Thank you for your time.

Brian, I realize that this particular computer is old. But I still feel like it’s fixable (and hopefully without paying apple a fortune to do it) , please let me know if I’m wrong. I have a 2012 series MacBook Pro. It was my main editing device up until this year. It started running extremely slow on me. I mean upwards of 20 minutes to even move from the login screen once entering my password, slow. I tried everything I could think of on my own, but it was almost impossible as it was just too lagging to do anything. I contacted apple support, they walked me through a ton of steps that I couldn’t tell you now, but they helped me to delete things that I didn’t know needed to be deleted and had never done in 6 years ( there was over 800,000 files ) and cleared a bunch of other things as well. It did nothing. Nothing at all. I ended up taking it in to be looked at, there was some malware? I think it was they called it, they got it off, and it went from about 20 min lag to a 18 min lag. They ended up replacing a hard robe cable, something about that years harddrive has movable parts and my cable was ruined. (It’s been out of commission for 5 weeks at this point) I was told it would be checked before getting it back. I can only assume that it wasn’t since it still wasn’t working properly. I took it back in, and ended up buying a new one as I was now almost 7 weeks behind on editing... I would however still like to have this computer as a back up if needed, if it’s possible. I will try to attach all the work order from apple so you know what they did. Thanks for your help!