Chosen Solution
My Laptop is old and running slow, but does function. However, It will not shut down, log out, or restart when chosen from the Apple menu. I can hard restart and it boots properly. I have reset my PRAM. Please help. It is very troublesome to hard reset such an old computer, and very difficult to update settings and apps.
What version of macOS are you running on this model? You could run some hardware diagnostics to see if it indicates your hard drive is failing. Press and hold “D” upon startup to enter Apple Hardware Test and allow it to run. If you are given the option of “Extensive Test”, please check the box and allow it to finish. You may notice it appears to freeze at various points during the test, but please allow it to continue. This test could take as long as 2 hours or so. Once it has finished, it will give you some error codes if any failure or error has been detected. Please post the error code if it isn’t obvious as to what failed. If no errors are detected, you could boot off of a macOS installation USB/DVD, enter Disk Utility, and run First Aid on the hard drive to see if any errors are detected and repaired. These are two things you can do to see if it can give you a better idea as to what is wrong and possibly fix the problem.
