Restoring my Mac Performance and eliminating or reducing Beach Balls

I have an older MacBook Pro - circa 2017, and

Currently, it is slowing down dramatically. I have removed large parts of the Storage from the included SSD and placed it on a connected NAS drive, but it does not seem to have helped. When using Word, the transition speeds and buffering make it hard to be productive. Is there a "cleaner" type software that might reclaim the disk space, and help reduce the Memory usage? Thanks !!

[Edited by Moderator]

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 13.7

Posted on Sep 1, 2025 10:11 AM

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MrHoffman

Community+ 2025

Level 10

144,051 points

Posted on Sep 1, 2025 2:37 PM

Remove the DuckDuckGo VPN, and remove the Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) client add-on security app, and the remaining pieces of Little Snitch.

I'd likely temporarily disable OneDrive and DropBox for testing, as so e file system clients can get unexpectedly busy. Grammarly, too.

And yeah, the battery is failing.

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Restoring my Mac Performance and eliminating or reducing Beach Balls

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