Very slow Mac upon Mavericks upgrade

Hi I'm trying to reformat my Macbook air 10.6.4 to factory settings. When I go into utilities than disk utilities and try to erase my HD , the erase is greyed out. I've been through youtube videos and cant figure it out. Also it doesn't work to power my computer on while holding the option button or the command, option and the r button I think it was. When I do this only one option comes up and that's just my HD NOT the recovery option. Anyone have any idea ?? Thanks so much

Foxybrown, please start a new topic, your question has no bearing on the OPs question and it would be confusing to have two different sets of answers running in one thread.

Jaodan, how much memory (RAM not disk) do you have in your macbook? When I upgraded my 2009 iMac to Mavericks i found i got a real speedup but I've read of machines with limited memory being slow.

Trying to delete post

Hi Tumbleweed sorry new to this forum and couldn't figure that out yesterday. Now I can't seem to find where to delete that post of mine. If you are able to delete it go ahead Or if you could tell me how that would be greatly appreciated. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone.

[[ I recently upgraded my MacBook Pro 13" (mid 2011) from Snow Leopard (I believe) to Mavericks. Although many new features work really well, I have never experienced any laptop or desktop run more slowly since the days of dial up. ]]

The solution is simple:
GO BACK to an earlier version of the OS.

You are not the first one to complain of this -- it's probably the single most common complaint about Mavericks I've seen.

I myself have the same results as you do. I sense that this has something to do with the way Mavericks has completely changed how memory is handled by the OS. Not a step forward in my opinion.

I would STRONGLY suggest that you "move back", but try Mountain Lion OS 10.8.5 rather than go all the way back to Snow Leopard.

Best way to do this without losing your existing data, accounts, and settings might be to:
1. Backup your internal drive to an external drive (I recommend CarbonCopyCloner which is free to download and use for 30 days)
2. Get ahold of a Mountain Lion install "dmg" (if you can't get this from Apple, it CAN be found if you do some searching, even in unsavory places)
3. Boot from the backup clone.
4. Re-initialize the internal drive
5. Install 10.8 onto the internal
6. Use Migration Assistant to "migrate over" your accounts, data and settings from the backup (I -have- used MA before to "migrate downward")

Again, my opinion only, but I have no intention of "moving beyond" OS 10.8.5 until there is no alternative but to do so...

jaodan said:

I apologize if this question is somewhat basic, but I could really use the help.

I recently upgraded my MacBook Pro 13" (mid 2011) from Snow Leopard (I believe) to Mavericks. Although many new features work really well, I have never experienced any laptop or desktop run more slowly since the days of dial up. I have plent of space (nearly 100GB) left on my hard drive and the only new installation lately has been Mavericks. However, simple tasks like opening a Youtube video now take 3x as long. Any advice on how to find the source of the problem or speed my computer up a bit? Thanks a lot!

Click to expand...

Yes download the free application EtreCheck and delete the old "hackies" manually that no longer support your new version of OS X.

re: Very slow Mac upon Mavericks upgrade

For me, removing Sophos Anti-Virus did the trick. Seems like Mavericks is extremely incompatible with certain older programs. Hope this helps.

jaodan said:

I apologize if this question is somewhat basic, but I could really use the help.

I recently upgraded my MacBook Pro 13" (mid 2011) from Snow Leopard (I believe) to Mavericks. Although many new features work really well, I have never experienced any laptop or desktop run more slowly since the days of dial up. I have plent of space (nearly 100GB) left on my hard drive and the only new installation lately has been Mavericks. However, simple tasks like opening a Youtube video now take 3x as long. Any advice on how to find the source of the problem or speed my computer up a bit? Thanks a lot!

Click to expand...

You have some invisible hackies that are not compatible with Mavericks. Download the free application EtreCheck and use that application to find incompatible "services" and manually deleting this old services.