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Why the heck does Windows run so much better than Mac OS?

sikkinixx

sikkinixx

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 10, 2005
2,062
0
Rocketing through the sky!
Like the other 800,000 people on this board, I got the new 2.2ghz MBP (no issues cept teeny bit of yellowing, solved via calibration :D) but I noticed something weird.

Windows XP runs like a bat outta hell. Games run smooth and silky, I never get the little hourglass, I can just run the crap out of it.

Mac OS? Different story. It takes a good 10-15 seconds to put it to sleep (my old macbook took about 3) and about 10 seconds to wake back up (again, Macbook was pretty near instant). When I use expose to open all the windows at once it's sluggish. Not super bad, but enough that I notice it. If I make the windows appear then disappear 4 or 5 times in a row then it goes smooth but it's kinda weird. I get the stupid spinning beachball a fair amount and it has actually frozen up on me a few times. WTF?

My friend who also has a MBP says his runs a little slower than he expected as well. Anyone else getting this? Think I should reformat the HDD? (if I do, I don't lsoe my Windows partition do it? It took hours to download Half Life 2 and I don't wanna do it again!)
 
U

uicandrew

macrumors 6502a
Jan 19, 2006
555
3
sikkinixx said:
Like the other 800,000 people on this board, I got the new 2.2ghz MBP (no issues cept teeny bit of yellowing, solved via calibration :D) but I noticed something weird.

Windows XP runs like a bat outta hell. Games run smooth and silky, I never get the little hourglass, I can just run the crap out of it.

My friend who also has a MBP says his runs a little slower than he expected as well. Anyone else getting this? Think I should reformat the HDD? (if I do, I don't lsoe my Windows partition do it? It took hours to download Half Life 2 and I don't wanna do it again!)
Click to expand...

is your winxp a fresh install? how about the mac os? did you have a lot of stuff transfered using migration assistant? you can close your lid and it will go to sleep automatically. my 2.4 SR MBP goes to sleep immediately (like 1 sec)

besides, don't you have the original disc for half life 2 from when you bought it?
 
djinn

djinn

macrumors 68000
Oct 4, 2003
1,762
234
OS X flies on my MBP. Heck, I have WOW playing in the background while listening to music and surfing the net. Sometimes I'll even add a youtube video in there while do all those other things, no skips nothing..
 
sikkinixx

sikkinixx

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 10, 2005
2,062
0
Rocketing through the sky!
hmmm


Both are fresh installs since I always get rid of all the crap that Apple loads onto the machine (I don't need a million printer drivers but thanks for caring). I did not use transition and when I close the lid it takes just as long to go to sleep, that really bugs me because I have to watch it to make sure the Apple goes out and the sleep light comes on.

And I have the discs for Half Life, but I lost my CD key *doh* and when I tried to install it with the cd's it keeps getting an error so I gave up!
 
Fayler

Fayler

macrumors regular
Jun 6, 2007
102
0
OS X has a lot more going on than windows XP. For starters, I believe that OS X takes up more ram and it definitely has more graphical doo-hickeys (technical term) on the desktop.

You probably don't have a lot of programs that boot up when you go into windows. Maybe your anti-virus software and steam. I can't imagine much else. Thats probably why. You can play around with what boots up with OS X to speed it up.
 
sikkinixx

sikkinixx

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 10, 2005
2,062
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Rocketing through the sky!
It just picks me since my 1.83ghz CD Macbook with 512mb of Ram, while it booted up slower, ran smoother for day to day operating than the brand new mbp I have now :mad: Maybe I need to give it a reinstall.
 
F

FullmetalZ26

macrumors regular
Jun 12, 2006
159
0
Keep in mind that Windows XP is also a six year old operating system...it came out when 700MHz Pentium III's with 256MB RAM were hot stuff.
 
A

amoda

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2006
660
8
The reason why it takes your mbp so long to go to sleep and wake up is because of the amount of ram it has. Everytime you put it to sleep it copies the info held in ram onto the harddrive. That way if you pull out the battery, the battery runs out or something along that line happens you don't lose your info. You simply plug it in and it'll still wake up where it left. You can remove that feature if you'd like but i'm not sure how. There is something about it on the Apple support site if you want to check it out.
 
sikkinixx

sikkinixx

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 10, 2005
2,062
0
Rocketing through the sky!
FullmetalZ26 said:
Keep in mind that Windows XP is also a six year old operating system...it came out when 700MHz Pentium III's with 256MB RAM were hot stuff.
Click to expand...

Never thought about that, but it still doesn't explain why Mac OS is running so crappy. There shouldn't be any lag when I use expose and I shouldn't see the beachball when I am just opening a couple programs. I more or less just leave it in XP all the time since it runs much smoother, which isn't how it should be with a Mac ;)

amoda said:
The reason why it takes your mbp so long to go to sleep and wake up is because of the amount of ram it has. Everytime you put it to sleep it copies the info held in ram onto the harddrive. That way if you pull out the battery, the battery runs out or something along that line happens you don't lose your info. You simply plug it in and it'll still wake up where it left. You can remove that feature if you'd like but i'm not sure how. There is something about it on the Apple support site if you want to check it out.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I'll head over to the Apple site and surf around a bit there :D
 
Dafke

Dafke

macrumors 6502
Mar 24, 2005
261
0
check this article on mac sleep modes. i turned off save sleep now my macbook pro sleeps in 2 seconds like my old powerbook did.
 
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fuzzynavo

macrumors regular
Oct 13, 2004
107
0
CA
Funny you should mention the slow expose. I opened a bunch of windows just now, and the first few times I press F9 the animation is noticeably slower than subsequent times. It's not choppy or anything, just a little bit slower. :confused:
 
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otispunkmeyer

macrumors 6502
Jun 5, 2007
302
0
Middlesbrough UK
i reckon GUI lag is due to the graphics drivers...this is a new DX10 chipset and even nvidia themselves have been pretty slow with the drivers...especially mobile drivers

mine takes a good chunk of time to sleep, but i think this is due to what i have running when i sleep it...lots of stuff in the ram which has to be written to disk

it wakes up near instant though.

and when i run windows with parallels..its flipping lightning quick. not sure if thats windows, or mac because its a virtual machine isnt it
 
C

CoreWeb

macrumors 6502
Mar 2, 2007
456
0
Edge of reason
fuzzynavo said:
Funny you should mention the slow expose. I opened a bunch of windows just now, and the first few times I press F9 the animation is noticeably slower than subsequent times. It's not choppy or anything, just a little bit slower. :confused:
Click to expand...

My MBP did Exposé perfectly just now, and it's powering a 30" monitor.
 
B

bluush

macrumors 6502
Apr 20, 2007
336
455
I agree, if anything disappointed me about my new Mac it is how slow it is. Just tested right now, opened DivX player - took 8 seconds for the icon to stop bouncing in the dock, and 14 seconds for the beachball to go away. Doesn't bother me too much I suppose.. but for the prices we pay shouldn't we expect something a little faster? I've got a feeling the waiting game will only get worse when Leopard comes out.
 
sikkinixx

sikkinixx

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 10, 2005
2,062
0
Rocketing through the sky!
synth3tik said:
have you ever thought about that fact it maybe you.

Seems like you are expecting more from OS X then XP.

I get BSoD with XP all the time.
Click to expand...

It's not just me, my girlfriend notices it as well. If I spread the windows apart with F9 a few times really quickly it gets up to speed, but the first few times are noticeably slower than the later few.
 
benlee

benlee

macrumors 65816
Mar 4, 2007
1,246
1
sikkinixx said:
It's not just me, my girlfriend notices it as well. If I spread the windows apart with F9 a few times really quickly it gets up to speed, but the first few times are noticeably slower than the later few.
Click to expand...

what is the big deal about taking 10 seconds to go to sleep. I never understood that. You are putting it to sleep so obviously you are not using it anymore. walk away. or close the lid. I dont know how long it takes my mbp to sleep because i dont watch it with a stop watch in hand.
 
GFLPraxis

GFLPraxis

macrumors 604
Mar 17, 2004
7,152
460
sikkinixx said:
Like the other 800,000 people on this board, I got the new 2.2ghz MBP (no issues cept teeny bit of yellowing, solved via calibration :D) but I noticed something weird.

Windows XP runs like a bat outta hell. Games run smooth and silky, I never get the little hourglass, I can just run the crap out of it.

Mac OS? Different story. It takes a good 10-15 seconds to put it to sleep (my old macbook took about 3) and about 10 seconds to wake back up (again, Macbook was pretty near instant). When I use expose to open all the windows at once it's sluggish. Not super bad, but enough that I notice it. If I make the windows appear then disappear 4 or 5 times in a row then it goes smooth but it's kinda weird. I get the stupid spinning beachball a fair amount and it has actually frozen up on me a few times. WTF?

My friend who also has a MBP says his runs a little slower than he expected as well. Anyone else getting this? Think I should reformat the HDD? (if I do, I don't lsoe my Windows partition do it? It took hours to download Half Life 2 and I don't wanna do it again!)
Click to expand...


Kinda weird but I'm starting to get some similar things. OS X feels a bit slower than it used to, in terms of boot times and spinning beach balls.

Windows I've actually learned to appreciate a lot more. Windows performs EXTREMELY well...when you don't use it. If you use Windows a lot, then it goes to crap; my Windows PCs all run terribly, but my Boot Camp partition is sparsely-used and well-maintained with lots of disk space and I rarely surf the internet with it, and it performs excellently, with relatively few apps installed (just specific stuff that are Windows-only).

My Mac runs Windows better than my Windows PCs :)
 
K

katorga

macrumors regular
Oct 28, 2006
200
0
nothing odd on mine

Windows XP is blazingly fast, but it is a new, clean install with nothing more than 1 game, Office, OPenSSH, OpenGPG, TrueCrypt and Keepass loaded. What I notice with Windows is that I have to do a clean re-install every 6-9 months because it slows down over time (probably all the cruft I install and remove). The Nvidia drivers are also faster, around 30-40% difference in WoW performance for me.

OSX runs just fine for me.
 
H

Habusho

macrumors 6502
Aug 12, 2006
317
0
Seriously. Every month that you would use Windows would be slower than the past month. Whenever you installed an app it would throw around dlls' all over the place, add registry entries and most of the time the add/remove option of the program wouldn't remove everything. OsX is such a classy\aesthetically pleasing OS that it's fun just using it. Thankfully my business program runs off of java and I was able to move to a Mac from Windows.
 
sikkinixx

sikkinixx

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 10, 2005
2,062
0
Rocketing through the sky!
Dafke said:
check this article on mac sleep modes. i turned off save sleep now my macbook pro sleeps in 2 seconds like my old powerbook did.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. I always save my work before putting it to sleep anyway so I don't need 'safe-sleep' mode anyhow. :D

benlee said:
what is the big deal about taking 10 seconds to go to sleep. I never understood that. You are putting it to sleep so obviously you are not using it anymore. walk away. or close the lid. I dont know how long it takes my mbp to sleep because i dont watch it with a stop watch in hand.
Click to expand...

Because my professor once put his Powebook to sleep by closing the lid then put it in his bag. He later realized than even though he closed it, it never went to sleep and stayed running, closed in his bag for about 15 minutes. I don't wanna know what happens if the thing doesn't fall asleep then stays in my bag running closed with the screen on for a few hours between classes or whatever. My old macbook had a faulty hinge or something so it would wake itself up when I had it closed so that also makes me a little paranoid about the thing not actually falling asleep (i still check my bag every little bit to make sure the little light is glowing)

I like it to fall asleep quick because I wanna close it, shove it in my bag and move on without waiting long to see if it actually asleep. It's not a huge deal or anything, I thought it was something wrong with my laptop was all. And I fixed the minor annoyance so I'm happy :) Satisfied? ;)
 
2

2fives

macrumors regular
Nov 7, 2006
158
0
Surrey BC
Last night.

Trying to connect to my friends OSX server using Vista. What a friggen hassle, the icon just never shows up in the network. Finally after about 20 min of jacking around it works. I should mention when I booted into OSX it found it right away.

I should also add that IMO Vista solves the sleep problwm XP had. On my MBP Windows XP never woke up from sleep mode, made a few noises but the screen stayed blank. Vista seems to be working better.

I can honestly say that XP is starting to suck compared to Vista. But I will stay in OSX for my day to day use.
 
RedTomato

RedTomato

macrumors 601
Mar 4, 2005
4,155
442
.. London ..
OSX shouldn't take 10 secs to sleep. And you people who are claiming it's taking so long cos it has a large amount of RAM are deeply deeply wrong.

There's something else going on here.

One thing I've noticed is that some people don't realise how many programs they have running.

If it's taking 10 secs to sleep, or you're getting lots of beachballs, have a look at your dock. Do you have a lot of programs with little triangles under them, and lots of different docs open but minimised?

Try closing down some programs.

Pressing Apple+Tab will switch between your open programs. If you've got more than 4 or 5 open, need to close a few.

Macs do need a reboot every now and then. Try rebooting it about once a week.

Finally, running something like cocktail or onyx about once a month or every two months will help clean things up, re-do the pre-binding etc.

If none of these things help, then there's something more serious going on.
 
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