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Try shutting down, then restarting in safe mode. Hold shift key down when you hear the startup chime. This cleans out some stuff. If you can, boot from another HDD with a clean install OS and see if that makes a difference. You can look in the main root directory Library and see if there are any odd looking files in the LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons folder. Not the Library in the System folder, but the Library folder at the top level of the int HDD.

Thanks dude, that seems to have helped… at least for the Internet speed and the odd laggy behavior. It feels much better... I'm still seeing degraded HDD performance however, so there must have been more than one issue going on here. Big dip and still slower and took far longer than I would expect. Not all seesaw like before. It feels noticeably better but still not 100%. I talked to her about it and she said that right after she dropped it she could tell that it was immediately slower. I'm telling her to make sure she has backups because who knows how much longer it will last. Soon as she's comfortable she'll be upgrading it to SSD. I think it will last till then with only degraded performance. So does safe mode in OSX actually realign settings or something? The only other thing I did while it was in safe mode was remove a couple .plist files from those folders. For adobe crap and a couple of other well know programs… nothing fishy. Besides that I just rebooted and seems to have helped quite a bit. Thanks for the recommendations. You rule!