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Everything is so slow in Lion.

S

SBradford

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 2, 2011
39
0
I updated to Lion the day it was released and it was fine. Slowly and slowly it has become very very very slow. For instance, I just restarted my laptop (white unibody Macbook 2010 with 4GB RAM and 2.4ghz C2D) and I waited about 10 seconds after it had started to open iTunes and opening it took roughly 30 seconds, the laptop doesn't lag or crash or anything when it's loading, the icon will just bounce really smoothly until it opens and once it's open it runs fine. If I have a few apps open such as iTunes, Steam and Chrome, and I want to open Word or something it will literally take minutes for it to open, but once it's open it runs fine. Multi-touch gestures are smooth and work fine also. I have tried repairing permissions and the disk to no avail.

Some apps like Mail and iCal load pretty quickly (they bounce once or twice before loading) but other apps like Chrome, Skype, iTunes and MS Office take the longest. If I opened them and closed them and then re-open them they would load pretty much instantly but if I left them closed for say 10 minutes they would take longer to open again.

I was wondering whether reinstalling Lion through Lion recovery would make a difference? (I was going to do a clean install of Lion but I would then lose iLife that I no longer have the disc for. And the only thing I can backup with is a 16gb USB stick)


Oh, and I do have a lot of stuff installed so I'm not sure whether that would make it slow? Games like L4d2, CSS and Garry's mod are all installed. I have about 160GB of my 250GB HDD left.

So yeh my main question is would reinstalling Lion via Lion Recovery make my laptop go to the fast speed that it was when I first upgraded?

Thanks for your help.
 
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30 seconds for iTunes to fully open? How much music/videos does it manage? If it's 50+GB, I think it's about right for the type of drive Apple uses on default Macintosh computers. I'm assuming you're still using the standard one it came with which is probably a 5400RPM drive.

You have enough empty space for OS X, since it usually needs at least 15-20% of the drive empty to run fine Anything below 10-15% empty space will cause OS X to run slow and cause problems. So that's not an issue for you. I've also heard that Lion needs 4GB RAM, but runs better if 8GB are installed. Not sure if that's an issue for you since I'm still rocking a 09 MacBook Pro 2.66GHz C2D and 4GB RAM on Snow Leopard and can't give you first-hand experience. I'm also running an 160GB Intel SSD and a secondary 750GB 5400RPM drive for bootcamp (for gaming with Steam) and I'll be honest, it's been a while since I've used a non-SSD drive. Going back to the 5400 drive has been painful and I get those same symptoms with Windows 7. Takes 20-30 seconds for Chrome and Steam to run, but as soon as everything is up and running it's all good.

For you issue, since you tried repairing permissions and that didn't help. I'd use that 16GB drive and back up iLife apps and whatever you can't re-download again and reinstall OS X Lion. Search on Google how to backup iLife apps, since I'm not sure if you can just copy/paste the apps from OS X to the 16GB drive. You may need some other files found in other folders. Again, I'm not sure.

Reinstalling Lion may restore some of the speed, but it's not going to be a massive speed boost. iTunes will still take 6-7 bounces if you have a large library of music/etc. If reinstalling Lion doesn't help at all, the look into getting a Hybrid drive (e.g. Seagate Momentus XT) that has SSD qualities, but traditional harddrive space and price or an SSD (e.g. Intel or Crucial M4). If you go SSD, you'll love it and it will extend the life of your MacBook another year or two. I have a 2009 MacBook Pro and with the SSD I still think it has another two or three years of life easily. I'll upgrade, but it's for a nicer video card. Speed is a non-issue with an SSD.

Sorry, this post may not help you much getting this issue fixed soon but thought it might help you in the future.
 
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Thanks for your reply, my iTunes is 10GB. I have been considering upgrading my HDD for a while now to a SSD but I think I will wait a few years as they are pretty expensive and I am only a student.

I did try: http://www.macworld.com/article/1632..._x_10_7_2.html


I know it sounds a bit dodgey but seriously my apps are loading up within the first dew bounces now, even MS Office and apps like Spotify.

I didn't delete the file right off, I just dragged it onto my desktop like the article says and Lion re-created the folder and then I deleted the old one.

I will update on her if there are any changes but at the moment my laptop is running fine once again.

My symptons were not the beach ball so if anyone has the same as what I said above then I recommend that you try this option. If anything goes wrong you can alway just replace the new folder with the old one.


Thanks for your reply Mark.
 
Glad you found the link. Quite an odd thing to do and yet it seemed to make a world of a difference. At the moment I have these apps open: Steam, Mail, iTunes, Chrome, Twitter, Skype and Spotify and opening new apps is pretty quick with 3/4 bounces.
 
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