macbook pro going very slow

[slippyjim]

I'm mainly a windows man but as the local computer geek Ive been given a Macbook pro to sort out that is going soooooooooooooooooo slow
13 inch mid 2012
2.5GHz i5
4GB
500GBB HDD
El Capitan 10.11.6
It originally came with Mavericks installed

I have ran the disk check utility and it found something like this "invalid disk label cksum mismatch" but said everything else was OK

Are I correct in thinking that if I do a time machine backup, then reinstall El Capitan from a USB stick that I will download and create, then after the install I can recover from the backup all the original programs and documents etc?
Does the Time machine backup contain all the user data?
So far its done 5GB of 131GB of the backup and says it will take 17 hours more, is this normal?

Thanks

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

There can be several reasons for overall slowness - low free space, failing hard drive, third-party utilities such as MacKeeper/CleanMyMac, antivirus apps, etc.

-Did you repair the disk using Disk Utility when started up from the Recovery Partition?
-Yes, the default functions of Time Machine backup the entire drive including OS X, applications, and all user data.
-Depending on the drive you are using to backup to, it can take several hours for the first backup. In addition, if the hard drive is corrupted/failing, it can take quite a bit longer or even fail.

C