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Macbook air - is mine running slow or is it normal for the 1.8GHz speed ?

A

AF330i

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 15, 2010
7
0
I bought my son a macbook air 1.8 GHz with 2gb of ram back in April (2011).

On the internet when we have website open (for example yahoo.com), then we open another tab and use something of considerable memory ... for example I go to a car manufacturer (ie. http://automobiles.honda.com/)and use one of their build your car programs, the computer seems to run slower and slightly delayed while building the car using the interactive program.

I erased the harddrive and did a cleanb install of the software so it was factory fresh and then tried it again and still got the delays. It is not the internet in our home because we have cable boost and all of our other macs run very quickly.

I then did a hardware test and everythng came back 'ok'

Is it normal for this computer ?

thank you,
 
Fuchal

Fuchal

macrumors 68030
Sep 30, 2003
2,606
1,074
AF330i said:
I bought my son a macbook air 1.8 GHz with 2gb of ram back in April (2011).

On the internet when we have website open (for example yahoo.com), then we open another tab and use something of considerable memory ... for example I go to a car manufacturer (ie. http://automobiles.honda.com/)and use one of their build your car programs, the computer seems to run slower and slightly delayed while building the car using the interactive program.

I erased the harddrive and did a cleanb install of the software so it was factory fresh and then tried it again and still got the delays. It is not the internet in our home because we have cable boost and all of our other macs run very quickly.

I then did a hardware test and everythng came back 'ok'

Is it normal for this computer ?

thank you,
Click to expand...

Sounds normal, it's just Flash eating up a lot of CPU.
 
A

AF330i

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 15, 2010
7
0
Thank you for the advice ... I appreciate the responses.
 
D

DarwinOSX

macrumors 68000
Nov 3, 2009
1,636
183
soulreaver99 said:
Try using google chrome. Flash and Safari don't play well together.
Click to expand...

Chrome is not much better. Apple should have never shipped a 2 GB laptop. The best idea is to use click to flash to block flash unless you really need it.
 
SDColorado

SDColorado

macrumors 601
Nov 6, 2011
4,360
4,324
Highlands Ranch, CO
I have one of the 1.8GHz i7 models, and doing what you mention with half a dozen taps open in Safari, I went to the Honda site and built about every model they had listed. I have to say, the site was smoking fast. So fast, that some of the more subtle options I had to add and remove several times to see what and where they appeared. Certainly no lags, delays or slow downs. DarwinOSX may be correct in fingering the 2GB of RAM as a likely culprit.
 
nebrot

nebrot

macrumors regular
Oct 25, 2011
101
1
北京 (Beijing)
SDColorado said:
I have one of the 1.8GHz i7 models, and doing what you mention with half a dozen taps open in Safari, I went to the Honda site and built about every model they had listed. I have to say, the site was smoking fast. So fast, that some of the more subtle options I had to add and remove several times to see what and where they appeared. Certainly no lags, delays or slow downs. DarwinOSX may be correct in fingering the 2GB of RAM as a likely culprit.
Click to expand...
You have the 2011 i7 with 4Gb, the threadstarter has the late 2010 C2D with 2Gb. There is for sure a significant difference.
 
Queen6

Queen6

macrumors G4
Dec 11, 2008
10,876
10,884
Flying over the rainforest at dawn - Priceless
Make sure you have the latest version of Flash installed, the new version is far better. Chrome won't help as I believe it is still using an older version of Flash for it's plugin. Since switching to Flash 11 I have seen a big difference in my older Mac's performance...

With an SSD the 2Mb of RAM is ok for basic use, the lack of RAM simply forces the system to page more data to the SSD while not as fast as RAM it is still significantly faster than a mechanical drive. OS X is very efficient on memory usage and will release memory as required. With Flash 11 there is nowhere near the downside that previous iterations brought; higher temp & a associated fan noise, poor memory handling etc.
 
Last edited:
A

AF330i

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 15, 2010
7
0
SDColorado said:
I have one of the 1.8GHz i7 models, and doing what you mention with half a dozen taps open in Safari, I went to the Honda site and built about every model they had listed. I have to say, the site was smoking fast. So fast, that some of the more subtle options I had to add and remove several times to see what and where they appeared. Certainly no lags, delays or slow downs. DarwinOSX may be correct in fingering the 2GB of RAM as a likely culprit.
Click to expand...

Actually I was really going to Porscheusa.com but figured Honda would be a good example ... maybe their website is faster than Porsches ...

Can I add more ram to the Air ?
 
J

jamesr19

macrumors 6502
Nov 7, 2009
251
0
The RAM is soldered onto the MBA motherboard. 2GB was never a great idea even if it was cheaper.
 
theSeb

theSeb

macrumors 604
Aug 10, 2010
7,466
1,893
none
AF330i said:
Actually I was really going to Porscheusa.com but figured Honda would be a good example ... maybe their website is faster than Porsches ...

Can I add more ram to the Air ?
Click to expand...

It's an invalid comparison since his computer is much faster than yours.
 
SDColorado

SDColorado

macrumors 601
Nov 6, 2011
4,360
4,324
Highlands Ranch, CO
nebrot said:
You have the 2011 i7 with 4Gb, the threadstarter has the late 2010 C2D with 2Gb. There is for sure a significant difference.
Click to expand...

There is for sure, and I don't disagree with that, but when I visited that site, and now the Porche site, CPU usage is actually pretty minimal. Memory Usage was over 2GB though, so I thought perhaps that might have been a bigger factor than CPU. Perhaps I am under estimating the impact of the 2011 i7, even at minimal CPU usage however.

Edit: Just for the sake of curiosity. I fired up my wife's '07 15" MBP with 2.2GHz CD2 and 4GB RAM and also went to each of the sites. Again, no problems with the sites and no delays while building the cars. Is anyone else experiencing the same issues as the OP if they visit the sites?
 
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J

jjhoekstra

macrumors regular
Apr 23, 2009
206
29
Using my 2010 MacAir (2.0 Ghz and 4 Gb Ram) the Honda-site is very fast and responsive. CPU usage is low, but RAM use is around 1.6 Gb. I would say that 2 Gb RAM is too little. But we knew that already!
 
K

KPOM

macrumors P6
Oct 23, 2010
18,024
7,867
AF330i said:
I erased the harddrive and did a cleanb install of the software so it was factory fresh and then tried it again and still got the delays. It is not the internet in our home because we have cable boost and all of our other macs run very quickly.
Click to expand...

Did you use "Erase Free Space" on Disk Utility to erase the drive? If so, that could cause the SSD to run more slowly. Since you have 2GB of RAM, it will be swapping out to disk quite a lot when something memory-intensive like lots of Safari tabs or Flash are running.

If you did, what OS are you running (Snow Leopard or Lion)? If you are running Snow Leopard, have you updated to the latest version (10.6.8) that enables TRIM?

There are some Terminal commands out there to "force" a TRIM, which isn't usually necessary, but might be helpful if you ran a secure erase and noticed a slowdown. It might even speed up rebooting a little.

According to one post here, you can reboot by holding down CMD-S, enter Terminal and type in the following command:

  • fsck -ffy
 
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