Leopard slow on a brand new Macbook

[marcinito]

Hi all,

Here's what happened. I had bought a Macbook about 9 months ago. Unfortunately, last week I spilled white wine on it and it died. I am in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the machine was bought in Poland. Either way I took it to authorized service and the guy told me that Logic was shot. Replacing it, according to him, didn't have much sense, because it's very expensive and still I couldn't have any guarantees that something else wouldn't come up later, after the fix.

So I decided to buy a new one.

The only difference is that it's running Leopard, as opposed to Tiger on the previous machine. I told the technicians to move all my data from the old macbook to the new one (it was bought at the same place), and so they did.

When I arrived home with the new computer, I noticed that the systems performance is slower:

- The genie effect is glitchy
- The dock appears in a glitchy way
- switching between the window is slower and glitchy
- there is a visible delay between clicking an icon and taking action, be it opening windows, or opening apps.
- Safari, stops to respond virtually every time I try to close it.
- Some other applications also crash, but not as often as Safari.

I browsed through this forum and found out that, at least for a vast majority of people, the swith from Tiger to Leopard was of great benefit and the system actually respond quicker and smoother. And this is not even in the case of a brand new machine!

I disabled the 3D dock and played around with some settings of Spotlight. It's still the same.

I am not that much into macs, as I have been using them for only 9 months, but still something seems not all right. If I wanted to have an unresponsive computer I would have bought a PC, right?

The amount of data moved between the computers was of roughly 70 Gigs. Is it possible that such a transfer might have choked it a bit? It still has 10 gigs of free space...

Any ideas, guys?:confused:

[kuwisdelu]

After that big of a transfer, the first thing I'd try is repairing permissions. Was the old hard drive bigger? If the old hard drive was bigger than the new one, that would explain it. All I can think of is first repair permissions. If that doesn't work, you might try an Archive & Install? That would preserve your data and see if the original OS install was just glitchy.

If that doesn't work, try verifying the disk for errors with Disk Utility. May be you just got unlucky and it's a machine with bad hardware.

After those ideas.... umm can you take it in and show them?

[marcinito]

thanks for the reply!

can you guide me a bit how to perform these steps? As I said, I am not that good with sticking my fingers into the system...

cheers

[karenflower]

To repair permissions, go into your Applications folder and then the Utilities folder. Click on the 'Disk Utility' icon, and select your hard drive from the list on the left.

There are some First Aid options, Verify/Repair Disk Permissions and Verify Disk (you can't repair it whilst the disk is in use).

So all you need to do is click 'Repair Disk Permissions' and wait. :) You could also click 'Verify Disk' to check that there's nothing wrong with it.

To do an Archive and Install, you need to boot up with the Leopard CD it came with. Whilst following the steps, there will be an option to do this. It will make a fresh install of Leopard and you can then manually copy your files over from the archive folder.

Hope this helps!

[marcinito]

I am doing the "Repair Permissions" but I am a bit worried that it's saying "less than 1 minute" and the progresion bar seems to have stopped...

How long should it take?

thanks for all the tips, guys!

[marcinito]

ok, it actually finished.

this is what it says:

ACL found but not expected on "Library/Application Support/Apple/iChat Iconds/Flowers.jpg

...and a couple of other items in this directory.

At the end it said that the permission replair is complete.

What do you think?

[karenflower]

That doesn't sound too bad. Have you noticed any difference? If not, you should try the other steps too. :)

[johnnyjibbs]

Are you running Leopard version 10.5.2 (the latest)? I had many of the same problems on my G4 PB when I upgraded from silky smooth Tiger, but they were all fixed in 10.5.2 update. Just a thought.

[Killyp]

10gb free is no way near enough.

You should generally keep about 20% free (as with all OSes).

See if you can clear any of your old stuff out... or see about getting a bigger HDD or an external HDD to archive things onto...

[dwsolberg]

1. First make sure to update to 10.5.2.
2. Make sure you have at least 15% of your hard drive space available. (If not, you need to either upgrade the hard drive or trash some files to make room.)
1. My next question would be whether the computer is very hot, with fans blowing loudly. That would mean that some rogue application is eating away at the processor cycles. If so, launch Activity Monitor to find out the culprit.
2. If the computer is not excessively hot, then I would probably create a new user and log in as that user to see if that solves the problem. If so, log back into your user account, make a backup of your preferences (hard drive/users/your user name/Library/preferences), trash the preferences and restart. That should solve the problem.
3. If none of those items work, there is probably a misbehaving application that is running some backup process that is slowing things down. Try looking at your startup items folder for a start.

[James17]

I'm still noticing choppy performance when setting the dock to maximize at full and also minimizing and clicking apps in the dock using genie effect.

[marcinito]

ok,

- the computer is not excessively hot. the fans are all right.
- on a 80 GB drive I have +11 GB of space free, but I never had such problems with the previous machine.
- Activity Monitor shows nothing unusual: iTunes, Skype, torrent app (which is crashing a lot today), Safari

I will now try to create another account to see what happens. BRB!

[aross99]

How much memory do you have? Leopard needs more ram than Tiger. I would make sure you have at least 1G with Leopard...

[marcinito]

i noticed one strange (at least to me) thing:

System Preferences - Accounts - Login Items:

I have a couple of items that I don't know, like System Events and Magic Menu.

Should they be there?

[marcinito]

How much memory do you have? Leopard needs more ram than Tiger. I would make sure you have at least 1G with Leopard...

it's a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB or RAM and 80 GB of hard disk.
OS: 10.5.2

[marcinito]

i logged in with a guest account and compared the performance. the 3D dock is much less smooth than the 2D one, even on the guest account. I didn't notice any change with opening programs neither.

[marcinito]

after opening console I found hundreds of messages like this, more keep coming up. This is related to my torrent program.

08-02-29 20:27:04 Bits on Wheels[668] *** -[NSCFDictionary objectsForKeys:notFoundMarker:]: marker is nil - this will be an exception in applications linked on Leopard.

Could it be a problem?
Perhaps this app is not really kosher while running on Leopard?

[kuwisdelu]

Ah! That could likely be the problem. Lots of torrent programs tend not to work that well with OS X. Try uninstalling that (assuming you don't have some big investment in it or anything) and using something like Transmission or Azureus instead and see if that helps any.

Edit: I just checked Bits on Wheels' homepage. The current version is from 2005. That sounds like the culprit to me.

[marcinito]

I'll do that.

But I also ran the "verify disk" and it found some errors, said it should be repaired, but I can't run the "repair disk" as this option is not available. There is a note saying that I can run it from the leopard CD, but I haven't found any disk utilities there. How to find it?

[Amdahl]

You can run Disk Utility by booting the DVD, proceeding towards install, but when the menubar appears, run Disk Utility from the menubar.

[KingYaba]

Download MainMenu (http://www.santasw.com/) and run it.

[marcinito]

Download MainMenu (http://www.santasw.com/) and run it.

I downloaded the program a started indexing the spotlight again. Something is wrong - the estimated time is increasing, it's like 130 hours already. There is no option to stop it. The fan is woring on full power and the machine is pretty hot. Should I be worried? What do I do?

[crazzyeddie]

I would do an archive and install of OS X, or even better yet, backup your data to an external hard drive and do a clean install, then restore your data.

[marcinito]

@ crazyeddie: I don't want to do that just yet, although it may be the best option. I want to tweek the system for better performance first.

@ kingyaba: what tasks do you recommend to run with the MainMenu? I indexed the spotlight again (it finished), cleaned system cache and all users' caches.

[marcinito]

Hmm.. I don't know if you remember the issue. I actually gave up for a while..
I only wrote an email to the store / service where I bought my MB and described them the problem I was experiencing. Their reply was nothing different from all the tips you guys had given me - first they told me that Leo may actually be a bit 'choppy' with 1GB of RAM, can anyone confirm this? It does make sense to me, to some extent, but as far as I recall the min. req for Leo is 512MB of RAM - I would think that on 1GB it should run all sweet. They also suggested to create a new account and so on...

Anyhow, today I did an archive&install, but I was a bit scared since I didn't have a disk that I would use to make a copy of my hard drive. The installation went smooth, but the problems persist. It's not anything that serious - it's just worrying that things don't work as smooth as on my previous MB with Tiger. I hope that Apple will come up with some solution to this, otherwise I am left with no other option but to buy + 1GB of RAM.

I have a question though:

after the install I have a folder with the previous system. What does it contain and what should I do with it? before the install I actually removed all the non-apple apps, so I don't need to restore any of them. Can I just delete it or should I overwrite some of the folders on top of the corresponding ones in the new system?

Cheers!

[IJ Reilly]

You need to get that disk repaired! It appears that Disk Utility reports errors but that you have not repaired them yet. This should always be done before attempting anything else.

[marcinito]

thanks man, but I did do that actually. I launched disk utilities from the Leo CD and did the repairing bit. no improvement.

[IJ Reilly]

Did it report that the repairs were completed successfully?

[marcinito]

it did complete the repairs, but didn't say whether it found any errors. guess that since it hasn't reported any errors that were fixed, it didn't find any.

now, I'm starting to think that's bad..

[BrianKonarsMac]

Back up your important data, wipe the drive and do a clean install. It sounds like the transferring of files to your clean OS did not go over well, especially if you have glitching system animations and such. It is likely a conflict of previous system files/settings with Tiger.

If you don't want to do that, bring it to an Apple store and let them run their utilities on it. Assuming you have the system discs and a spare harddrive, backing up/wiping your system and installing a new OS will take the better part of an afternoon.

[marcinito]

damn...
the problem is that I don't have an external drive. i'll have one in 1 month more or less. and the apple service people are shmucks... or at least people missing the basic level of empathy.

I guess I'll just keep it like this until then. What about the previous system folder? what does it contain? what to do with it? until I move my files I have to keep my disk fairly free (10gigs at least), so I'm looking for any data I don't need and bin it.

Just to confirm: so Leo should run like Virgin Mary with 1Gb, right?

[IJ Reilly]

it did complete the repairs, but didn't say whether it found any errors. guess that since it hasn't reported any errors that were fixed, it didn't find any.

now, I'm starting to think that's bad..

Not necessarily. If it didn't repair disk damage then it would have said so. You can run it again, but this probably isn't going to be helpful.

Did you try removing the torrent applications?

[marcinito]

Did you try removing the torrent applications?

no, I switched to transmission, as someone suggested it before. Torrent apps shouldn't be a problem. I know that not all of them (I guess none) are updated for Leo, nevertheless they should work.

[FloridaBSD]

10gb free is no way near enough.

You should generally keep about 20% free (as with all OSes).

See if you can clear any of your old stuff out... or see about getting a bigger HDD or an external HDD to archive things onto...
Another pet peeve of mine is newbies referring to Slack as free space , this annoys me because it symbolizes Lack of Technological illiteracy.

So for all feature ref fence please reffer to your Frees pace as slack which is the correct terminology used in the A plus pc repair technician training manual

So the correct way to state he 20 percent free space point above is 20% slack (aws with all OSes).

Thanks,

FloridaBSD

AKA TopGun17 (Linux Questions)

[marcinito]

So the correct way to state he 20 percent free space point above is 20% slack (aws with all OSes).


you know, the funny thing with the tiger on my prevous MB, was that it was nowhere close to the level of glitchyness / choppyness that I experience on a brand new MB with the apple's latest development in OS, and it was with about 3GB slack, on a 80 GB drive. It worked perfectly fine, which makes me think that the problem must yet be elsewhere. I'm not sayin it doesn't matter, I'm sayin it worked fine before.

[IJ Reilly]

no, I switched to transmission, as someone suggested it before. Torrent apps shouldn't be a problem. I know that not all of them (I guess none) are updated for Leo, nevertheless they should work.

Torrent applications are a frequent source of issues. I'm not sure which ones are better or worse. If you could try running without any of them for a while this could be eliminated as a source of your performance issues. Do I understand correctly that the issues are limited to the Finder?

[Eraserhead]

no, I switched to transmission, as someone suggested it before. Torrent apps shouldn't be a problem. I know that not all of them (I guess none) are updated for Leo, nevertheless they should work.

Both Transmission and Azureus are fine for me on Leopard.

Another pet peeve of mine is newbies referring to Slack as free space , this annoys me because it symbolizes Lack of Technological illiteracy.

Seriously, does it really matter?

[marcinito]

Do I understand correctly that the issues are limited to the Finder?

after revising the issues are as follows:

- long boot time, compared to my previous MB, = about a minute
- expose is not smooth - switching between windows is glitchy
- opening an app causes beach ball effect. even with apple apps like iTunes, iPhoto etc. Not to mention Photoshop, MS Office... They eventually open.
- opening a finder window is not immediate, it takes 5 - 10 seconds.
- when working with lots of windows / apps, beach ball effect appears.
- applications folder is glitchy - but I already know that everyone has it, I read the Mac OS X 10.5.x features / fixes / troubleshooting
- switching between the albums in iTunes (with album art) is glitchy too. It seems like it needs more time to preload everything. I have about 30 GB of music.

maybe I will add something to this list later on, but for now no. 2,3,4 are annoying me.

[Eraserhead]

^^ Apps folder is fine on my MacBook. I also have no beachballing. However I do have 2GB RAM. How much do you have? (Check in Apple Menu>About this Mac) as having more will reduce beach balling.

[marcinito]

^^ Apps folder is fine on my MacBook. I also have no beachballing. However I do have 2GB RAM. How much do you have? (Check in Apple Menu>About this Mac) as having more will reduce beach balling.

I've got one, mate, and I am starting to think that this is the main source of my problems. I just don't know if anyone else is out there with 1 gig and having these issues.

[heatmiser]

I've got one, mate, and I am starting to think that this is the main source of my problems. I just don't know if anyone else is out there with 1 gig and having these issues.

What does your pie chart look like? Post a pic of your Activity Monitor with an avg. # of applications open. If you're down to <50mb within a day of uptime, you could probably do with more memory. I've got 2gb, and only 37mb free at the moment.

[marcinito]

What does your pie chart look like? Post a pic of your Activity Monitor with an avg. # of applications open. If you're down to <50mb within a day of uptime, you could probably do with more memory. I've got 2gb, and only 37mb free at the moment.

mkay, how do I make a screenshot?

[marcinito]

ok, got it.

[IJ Reilly]

Any virtual memory related slowdowns should not occur right away after a reboot. If the Mac does get slower as you work, and the performance issues disappear for a time after a reboot, then more RAM would help. If not, then it probably won't. BTW, the description "glitchy" doesn't help me understand the problem very well.

[marcinito]

Any virtual memory related slowdowns should not occur right away after a reboot. If the Mac does get slower as you work, and the performance issues disappear for a time after a reboot, then more RAM would help. If not, then it probably won't. BTW, the description "glitchy" doesn't help me understand the problem very well.

I wouldn't say that the performance drops significantly after a couple of hours of work. I would say that it's not right from the beginning, or within very short time after the reboot. By glitchy I mean delayed, or loosing frames in the case of switching between windows and expose. Sorry, English is not my mother tongue.

[heatmiser]

I would do an archive and install of OS X, or even better yet, backup your data to an external hard drive and do a clean install, then restore your data.

This is what I'd do. Create a complete clone of your drive via CCC. Reinstall Leopard on your hard drive, and boot into it to see if you notice a speed difference. From there, you can make a judgement call on whether or not to import your settings and programs and files via Migration Assistant or whether to start afresh. Of course, if it's still slow and glitchy, the problem might be memory related.

[mr appleseed]

I purchased a new Macbook a few weeks ago and it came standard with 2G ram and 160g on the hard drive. No files have been transferred and I am not experiencing any of the problems you describe. I do notice the other white case mac book has 1 g ram and 120gb hard drive. Are you sure that you have 80gb hard drive since that was the previous version of the white case MacBook not the latest version.

[marcinito]

I purchased a new Macbook a few weeks ago and it came standard with 2G ram and 160g on the hard drive. No files have been transferred and I am not experiencing any of the problems you describe. I do notice the other white case mac book has 1 g ram and 120gb hard drive. Are you sure that you have 80gb hard drive since that was the previous version of the white case MacBook not the latest version.

yeah, I am sure. I guess it has something to do with the region where you purchase your computer. At the store where I bought it in Buenos Aires, they had the 2.0GHz CPU / 80 GB HD, 2.16 GHz / 120 GB HD, and 2.16 GHz / 160 GB HD. As option you could ask them to crank up the RAM to 2 gigs. My machine is almost the same as the previous one - the only differences are that the one I bought in Poland had a SuperDrive as standard, and this one has a ComboDrive (which sucks), that one had the English keyboard layout and this one has Spanish, and that one had Tiger and this one has Leo. That's all.

Besides you can check the configuration in the About this Mac tab in the tool bar.

[IJ Reilly]

I wouldn't say that the performance drops significantly after a couple of hours of work. I would say that it's not right from the beginning, or within very short time after the reboot. By glitchy I mean delayed, or loosing frames in the case of switching between windows and expose. Sorry, English is not my mother tongue.

You're doing fine. I just wasn't sure what you meant. ;)

This is what I'd do. Create a complete clone of your drive via CCC. Reinstall Leopard on your hard drive, and boot into it to see if you notice a speed difference. From there, you can make a judgement call on whether or not to import your settings and programs and files via Migration Assistant or whether to start afresh. Of course, if it's still slow and glitchy, the problem might be memory related.

How is this going to help? He's already reinstalled OSX (archive & install) which replaced his system files.

[heatmiser]

How is this going to help? He's already reinstalled OSX (archive & install) which replaced his system files.

It would allow him to officially confirm whether or not his system runs slowly on a fresh install with nothing else on the hard drive but the operating system.

[IJ Reilly]

It would allow him to officially confirm whether or not his system runs slowly on a fresh install with nothing else on the hard drive but the operating system.

Of doubtful value. An archive & install bypasses any kernel extensions or drivers which may have been installed by third-party software. If software hasn't installed drivers or kernel extensions then that software can't affect the functioning of the OS. The only exception of which I am aware is startup items, which can be addressed easily without an OS reinstall. So for all intents and purposes, he's already done a "fresh" install.

[HLdan]

Ditto, I recommend the OP to completely erase his hard drive and play with Leopard on a clean install first, if all goes well then begin to install his needed apps one by one. It's really not the best idea to dump everything back on it at once as it could cause bugginess.

[IJ Reilly]

Ditto, I recommend the OP to completely erase his hard drive and play with Leopard on a clean install first, if all goes well then begin to install his needed apps one by one. It's really not the best idea to dump everything back on it at once as it could cause bugginess.

Unsupported by any logical reasons?

[HLdan]

Unsupported by any logical reasons?

Huh? Care to elaborate your statement?

[cwheatley]

...So for all feature ref fence...

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people use the phrase "ref fence".

According to the english dictionary, the correct term for this is "referee fence".

It is important for people to speak clearly when they're talking about the features of their referee fence.

In all seriousness though, I think there's something wrong with your keyboard.

[IJ Reilly]

Huh? Care to elaborate your statement?

I did in the post above. If he's already done an archive and install, then he's already removed any kernel extensions or drivers which might have been installed by third party software. If no drivers or kernel extensions have been installed by software, then installed software cannot have an impact on the performance of OSX, with the one stated exception. So I can't support the advice of nuking the hard drive when it doesn't appear to be supported by any troubleshooting logic.

[HLdan]

I did in the post above. If he's already done an archive and install, then he's already removed any kernel extensions or drivers which might have been installed by third party software. If no drivers or kernel extensions have been installed by software, then installed software cannot have an impact on the performance of OSX, with the one stated exception. So I can't support the advice of nuking the hard drive when it doesn't appear to be supported by any troubleshooting logic.

Well that's cute an all that you think you know everything but Archive and Install doesn't fix everything and at this point since the OP is still having issues it's always best to exhaust all options before throwing in the towel.

[IJ Reilly]

Well that's cute an all that you think you know everything but Archive and Install doesn't fix everything and at this point since the OP is still having issues it's always best to exhaust all options before throwing in the towel.

I don't think I know everything by any means. So tell me, what does archive and install not fix that is fixed with an erase and install? IOW, if you think I am wrong, please tell me specifically in what way.

[oceandamion]

after opening console I found hundreds of messages like this, more keep coming up. This is related to my torrent program.

08-02-29 20:27:04 Bits on Wheels[668] *** -[NSCFDictionary objectsForKeys:notFoundMarker:]: marker is nil - this will be an exception in applications linked on Leopard.

Could it be a problem?
Perhaps this app is not really kosher while running on Leopard?

Hi There,
I realise this is an old thread but I seem to be having similar problems and I just wanted to add a few things. I have been getting the same messages coming up in my console which suggests that Bit on Wheels is having some problems. But even when I delete Bits on Wheel and restart the computer, I seem to have the same issues.
I am wondering if Marcinito had these same problems after trying to use a mobile connect usb card. As it seems that this is when I started to have problems. I have uninstalled and updated all associated software, but seem to still be having the problems there too.
This is all sounding a bit like gibberish, but I am feeling a bit addled after going around in circles trying to fix this problem. The system is so slow that loading any page takes minutes rather than seconds. But if I switch off the card and use a dodgy wifi connection, the wifi is much quicker.
So it would appear to be all a usb card problem (vodafone mobile connect), but then the bits on wheels will not work properly either.
Any Suggestions,
Cheers