Client Reporting 'slow' Mac weeks after onsite visit

[Digital Sage]

Well this one is unique and painful.

New customer reports her mac is running slow. Yosemite. 8GB. i5 Processor. Do onsite, and it is a little slow. Nothing substantial. Just lock ups for seconds here and there.

Hard drive reports fine. No excessive pinwheels. I do my usual stuff - onyx full automation (permissions, cache cleaning, etc). PR reset. SMC reset.

Update office. Update spotify. Update printer drivers. It seems fine after this. Restart under 60 seconds. I load multiple programs. Email. Office. All good. Never stalls in me.

Also setup time machine for her, Show her how to use a personal hotspot, and a bunch of other stuff that she wants to know about.

Calls me back about three days later reporting its still slow. Ok. I go back over and I can't see it being slow at all. It stalls when accessing the Internet for perhaps 10 seconds. But then it's fine. I look into this. Apparently it's been 'slow' for some time. I never get any idea from her exactly how it's slow, and what she's doing when it slows down. She just says it's 'slow' and she needs to restart it. She reports that email doesn't come in at the same time as her iPhone / iPad. I test this. Send an email and it arrives 15 seconds later into her inbox on the mac. Again, can't see this happening.

Her son has installed a additional wifi modem because he said it would help with her speed issues. Thing is she has a cable internet connection. It's not slow by any means. I research and find that this new Wifi modem has been reported to cause stalls now and then. So I upgrade the firmware, and route her Mac into the main cable modem via Ethernet, bypassing the additional modem.

All up 1 hour onsite + 1 hour drive there and back for the second visit. I don't charge her.

System is fine. I can't see anything at all wrong with it. Again try all programs. All good. Restart twice. It's fine.

Two weeks pass. Get a SMS from her today. Apparently it's running slow again. I explain that I don't know where to go from here because I can't see it actually slowing down. Every time i've used it hasn't faulted. I go into details as to what i did.

She replies back that she'll find someone else if i find this issue 'too hard', and that i've forgotten how slow it was. Passive aggressive. I don't respond from that point. Short of completely reinstalling yosemite, all her programs, user files, etc, what else can be done???

I don't know if her expectations are off, or what. Hard to diagnose an issue that never really shows itself when you're onsite.

 

[altrenda]

i hate the "slow" complaint. What does it mean? Is it application slow, like beachballs opening word docs or opening programs? Or is it internet slow, pages take forever to load?
The second modem thing is confusing. Is it really behind 2 modems? Possibility of double NAT?

Couple of things to look at.
There is a problem with Yosemite and networking, especially WiFi. Apple is beta testing a fix now. http://9to5mac.com/2015/05/26/apple...omplaints-about-network-issues-with-yosemite/
Some people are copying the mdnsresponder file from earlier versions to replace discoveryd. I haven't tried it myself.

you can try creating a new user and seeing if that works faster.

For several systems, I have done a reinstall of Yosemite, instead of the upgrade over Mountain Lion or whatever. This has improved performance. Take a Time Machine backup, then reinstall the OS, and restore the data.

I don't think much of Onyx. If I am going to use something like that, I prefer Disk Warrior and TechTool Pro. Sometimes rebuilding the index with either of these will improve things.

 

[Digital Sage]

i hate the "slow" complaint. What does it mean? Is it application slow, like beachballs opening word docs or opening programs? Or is it internet slow, pages take forever to load?
The second modem thing is confusing. Is it really behind 2 modems? Possibility of double NAT?

Couple of things to look at.
There is a problem with Yosemite and networking, especially WiFi. Apple is beta testing a fix now. http://9to5mac.com/2015/05/26/apple...omplaints-about-network-issues-with-yosemite/
Some people are copying the mdnsresponder file from earlier versions to replace discoveryd. I haven't tried it myself.

you can try creating a new user and seeing if that works faster.

For several systems, I have done a reinstall of Yosemite, instead of the upgrade over Mountain Lion or whatever. This has improved performance. Take a Time Machine backup, then reinstall the OS, and restore the data.

I don't think much of Onyx. If I am going to use something like that, I prefer Disk Warrior and TechTool Pro. Sometimes rebuilding the index with either of these will improve things.

Thanks for the tips.

I don't have much of an issue with 'it's slow' because normally that means excessive pinwheels, obviously slow, waiting for 30 seconds or more, lags etc.

Apart from a few momentary lags I didn't see anything resembling any other slow Mac issues I've normally been able to tackle.

I used this system for over two hours and once my initial attempts to speed it up with executed it was as fast and snappy as any MacBook I've used.

Very strange.

PS : The double modem issue was confusing, thats why i bypassed the second one and plugged into the main cable modem AND turned off Wifi on the Macbook. Why they thought another modem with Wifi when they already had one would solve issues is beyond me.

 

[cyabro]

I had a fairly new iMac come in last week with the "running slow" complaint.
I run all the hardware tests and no issues and using the system can't see any issues with speed.
Talking to the customer again actually get from them that's slow on the Internet.
On further investigation I found that there was an iMovie update that was downloading and crashing almost at the end of the approx 2gb update. It would then start downloading again and so on.
It wasn't causing any issues in our workshop as we are on a 200mbps down/up fibre connection but the customer is only on adsl at home. Fixed the update and customer took it home and said its all good now.

 

[Pacific Blue IT]

Cable connections can be super fast if your the only one on it.
As soon as your neighbours come home from work or school and jump on it can slow down significantly as the contention ratio goes up. I'd be requesting her to note what time it was slow and what it was she was doing and what programs she was running. Not sure if there's a mac equivalent of 'last activity view' but there should be logs you can check against the time she records that might help if macs keep logs.

 

[calldrdave]

This isn't a Mac issue, but a customer expectation issue. If you don't define the problem, you'll never resolve it. I give this example:

Patient: "Doctor, I'm sick"
Doctor: "What's bothering you"
Patient: "I don't know, you're the doctor, I'm sick"

She has a mobile phone and isn't afraid to use it so have her record with video when the problem occurs.

I suspect given her attitude, she'll say she's too busy. If that's the response you can take two approaches, one snarky and one slightly less

1) "If it's slow, then you should have time to record this"
2)"When you get the time, I'd be delighted to review your video. I appreciate your assistance in solving this problem"

If she insists on calling someone else, respond "I think a second opinion on this issue is a stellar idea."

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

I had a fairly new iMac come in last week with the "running slow" complaint.
I run all the hardware tests and no issues and using the system can't see any issues with speed.
Talking to the customer again actually get from them that's slow on the Internet.
On further investigation I found that there was an iMovie update that was downloading and crashing almost at the end of the approx 2gb update. It would then start downloading again and so on.
It wasn't causing any issues in our workshop as we are on a 200mbps down/up fibre connection but the customer is only on adsl at home. Fixed the update and customer took it home and said its all good now.

I used to see stuff like this pretty consistently when I was still doing residential. Mainly Dropbox or something similar trying to upload their entire iphoto library. Also, check for crapware like Mackeeper or TuneupmyMac. As far as the "Hard drive reports fine". What exactly reported the HD as being fine? Without knowing the specs of this machine, what I'm reading it looks to be at least a 4 year old machine. If it's the original drive, the upgrade to Yosemite could have more than it could handle and maybe there are failing sectors on the drive that she is hitting here and there?

 

[FremontPC]

Maybe offer to remote in when it's being slow so she can show you what she means?

 

[Markverhyden]

You did not mention these steps so I'm tossing them out there. Boot into recovery mode and run Repair Disk and Repair Disk Permissions. Another thing I'll try in situations like these is use CCC and copy the drive to a thunderbolt or firewire drive and boot from that to see what happens. As we all know these disk testing/reporting tools hand out plenty of false positives.

You should also run a continuous ping to the gateway, a public IP address and a public FQDN. On occasion network devices go wonky and a power cycle fixes thing. Or there may be other downstream problems.

Does she ever shut down the computer down? How many browsers, browser tabs and apps does she leave up and running? I'm guilty of this. I might have 2 or three browsers open with maybe aa many as a dozen tabs each. Then Office, other apps. And things like ownCloud and OneDrive running in the back ground. And I might go 10-12 days without rebooting the computer. At some point some processes can go zombie.

Along with the above one time I had a problem on my previous MBP. Something went happened between Java and the OS and nothing I tried would fix the beach balling so I just ended up doing a nuke and pave.

 

[cypress]

Maybe offer to remote in when it's being slow so she can show you what she means?

Yes I do this when I am asked that question. From what it seems though you did alot to help rectify the problem.

 

[Digital Sage]

Thanks for all the tips. The video idea was good. She pretty much told me she was going to find someone else, after telling me 'it's too hard for you'. She can't tell me how it slows down, i got it running fine, she saw this and was happy when i left. Then when i come back i find it's still fine, occasional internet pause but that's her internet provider. Rich older lady who's house is spotless and expects first class service. After doing the second visit for free and finding it was a modem issue, she can go find someone else, and they can deal with the same ****, and get nowhere because it's probably her internet she's talking about and nothing to do with the mac at all. That's my feeling on the whole nightmare.

I did everything under the sun. Pretty much all that was mentioned here diagnostic wise.