Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

1 Week Macbook Pro 2.2Ghz Sandy Bridge Quad Core 8gb Ram is really slow

J

jnd3344

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 5, 2011
24
0
I dont know whats going on but the color wheel keeps appearing constantly when using safari and other applications which seems weird to me having these specs. I also restored it with time machine with the backup from my old computer. Might it be some malware or something? Thanks
 
Last edited:
Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example
Acitivty_Monitor.png


Also take a look at the Disc Activity section at the bottom of Activity Monitor.
 
The slowness is probably caused by HDD activity, since it's very hard to bottleneck a HT-enabled quad core CPU.

If you look in the screenshot above, along the bottom is a row of buttons. Select the middle, 'Disk Activity' and see if the chart is displaying a lot of activity, also check the bottom left stats: Reads in/sec, Writes out/sec.
 
i restarted my mac, gonna wait till it starts freezing/hanging again so i can take the activity monitor screenshots
 
When I had the beach ball that seemed to never want to go away, we ( Apple and myself ) did all the various resets, disk permissions and whatnot.

I did them first at home, then went to the Apple Store where they ran one test and declared the HDD to be a candidate for replacement.

Left it there, picked it up a day later and the problem never reappeared.
 
jnd3344 said:
I dont know whats going on but the color wheel keeps appearing constantly when using safari and other applications which seems weird to me having these specs. I also restored it with time machine with the backup from my old computer. Might it be some malware or something? Thanks
Click to expand...

Unless you look at the Activity Monitor (as some other posters have suggested), there is really no way to know what the problem is. Start with that...
 
jnd3344 said:
I dont know whats going on but the color wheel keeps appearing constantly when using safari and other applications which seems weird to me having these specs. I also restored it with time machine with the backup from my old computer. Might it be some malware or something? Thanks
Click to expand...

out of curiosity, what hard drive do you have?
 
Sounds very strange, I got the exact same setup (2.2, 8 GB) and it really is an amazing machine. I use Chrome, not Safari but I have not seen any swap outs at all so far. No color wheel either for that matter.

It might still be the hard drive but that should mostly affect the application load time and browsing through files, not web browsing. What you are experiencing is not normal and I would probably just take it back and ask someone to have a look.

You could have a look at the Disk Activity page in Activity Monitor and see if anything special happens there while you see the beach ball.
 
Check spotlight too. That can really bog things down if not working properly. My gut says you have a problematic hard drive, though.
 
bozz2006 said:
Check spotlight too. That can really bog things down if not working properly. My gut says you have a problematic hard drive, though.
Click to expand...

what do you mean with checking spotlight and yeah my hard drive is 720gb and have abotu 250gb used right now
 
That number is completely reasonable. Have you used disk utility to verify the status of your hard drive?

utilities > disk utility > verify disk
 
i found that firefox 4 slowed the machine down like molasses. i don't know why... it starts out fine, but within an hour of usage, the whole machine slows down.
 
jnd3344 said:
yeah this is appearing and using 215mbs
Click to expand...

To be honest, you don't give much information back. We give you advise to monitor your Mac and you don't return the appropriate information. Thus we will walk in circles.
Can you please tell us which steps you have done yet?
SMC or PRAM reset?
Activity Monitor and sorted by CPU and RAM usage?
Looked at Activity Monitor > Disk Activity and looked at the "Data read or written / sec", and Activity > System Memory and looked for "Page Outs" and "Page Ins"?

Btw, "mbs" is not short for the plural of MegaByte (MB) and can be confused with Megabit (Mb) per second (Mb/s or Mbps) or MegaByte per second (MBps or MB/s).
 
simsaladimbamba said:
To be honest, you don't give much information back. We give you advise to monitor your Mac and you don't return the appropriate information. Thus we will walk in circles.
Can you please tell us which steps you have done yet?
SMC or PRAM reset?
Activity Monitor and sorted by CPU and RAM usage?
Looked at Activity Monitor > Disk Activity and looked at the "Data read or written / sec", and Activity > System Memory and looked for "Page Outs" and "Page Ins"?

Btw, "mbs" is not short for the plural of MegaByte (MB) and can be confused with Megabit (Mb) per second (Mb/s or Mbps) or MegaByte per second (MBps or MB/s).
Click to expand...

ok here is all the information you could possibly need ;)

Screenshot2011-04-07at24100PM.png

Screenshot2011-04-07at24051PM.png

Screenshot2011-04-07at24041PM.png

Screenshot2011-04-07at24031PM.png
 
jnd3344 said:
ok here is all the information you could possibly need ;)

images
Click to expand...
Thanks.

From those images I can't see anything wrong, but others may differ.
It might be a bad HDD after all. Can you look at Disk Utility > S.M.A.R.T. status (at the bottom of the window) and report back?
Do you have an Apple Store or Apple Certified Repair Centre in your area?
 
simsaladimbamba said:
Thanks.

From those images I can't see anything wrong, but others may differ.
It might be a bad HDD after all. Can you look at Disk Utility > S.M.A.R.T. status (at the bottom of the window) and report back?
Do you have an Apple Store or Apple Certified Repair Centre in your area?
Click to expand...

why are there 5.86gb of used ram, thats actually low most of the time its in the 6's and the 7's. My previous macbook used to have 4gb ram and i would run the same processes and it as alaways less than 3gb ram or something
 
jnd3344 said:
why are there 5.86gb of used ram, thats actually low most of the time its in the 6's and the 7's. My previous macbook used to have 4gb ram and i would run the same processes and it as alaways less than 3gb ram or something
Click to expand...

Sort by "Real Memory" to see where the RAM goes to. Just know, that 256MB is used by the Intel HD IGP.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back