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A Step Back: The possibility of Mavericks to Mountain Lion

RandomCitizen

RandomCitizen

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 24, 2014
43
0
Goldsboro, NC
As you can see in my signature line, I have a MBP 13" Core Duo 2.4 GHz with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of SSD.

Ever since I have upgraded to Mavericks from Mountain Lion, my computer has become one spinning wheel after another. It is as slow as a seven year itch!

If I go back to Mountain Lion, just exactly what will I lose other than the new keychain - which even though I use 1Password, I think the new Keychain is marvelous!

Thanks,
 
RandomCitizen said:
If I go back to Mountain Lion, just exactly what will I lose other than the new keychain - which even though I use 1Password, I think the new Keychain is marvelous!

Thanks,
Click to expand...
You can see the 200 features that apple promotes in Mavericks here: http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html

You'll probably miss a lot of the little nuances that they built into the OS, but if you're dealing with issues with stability and performance, definitely go back and see if that fixes things.

btw, make sure you have a backup of your data :)
 
If you haven't done it yet, backup all your data, erase your drive and do a clean install of Mavericks, then move your data back.
 
Sky Blue said:
If you haven't done it yet, backup all your data, erase your drive and do a clean install of Mavericks, then move your data back.
Click to expand...


For Mavericks, I hate to say this, but I did a clean install of Mavericks twice and I still suffer from lagging speed issues. It's real frustrating. I don't want to go back, but when you first crank up the machine, even from just "sleep," it is unusable for a few minutes. It has to get everything going again.
 
Fair enough if you've already done it. You may want to wait until 10.9.2 (March?), to see if that resolves it, but if it's really unusable sounds like you may need to go back to 10.8.
 
Sky Blue said:
Fair enough if you've already done it. You may want to wait until 10.9.2 (March?), to see if that resolves it, but if it's really unusable sounds like you may need to go back to 10.8.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm going over to the mother-in-law's house (damn it, Jim!) where I can download the earth in 10 minutes. My DSL doesn't do that.

Thanks for the consult guys.
 
Well, it is my personal opinion that the Core Duo 2 just isn't up for it with Mavericks. I reinstalled 10.8 and it runs like a mountain lion ;) !!
 
That's weird to hear. On my Early 2009 Mac Mini with 2GHz Core 2 Duo & OEM 5400 RPM hard drive I upgraded it from Lion to Mavericks a couple months ago. With the OEM 2GB of ram it was usable but noticeably slower with beach balls fairly often. Now that it has 8GB of ram it's very quick & I rarely see a beach ball.

I wonder if there's an underlying issue with your MBP. It seems weird to me that your 2013 MBP with 8GB ram & a SSD HD had issues running Mavericks. FYI, I'm far from being a computer expert so I'm only saying this out of curiosity.
 
Honestly, I agree. It almost sounds like something would HAVE to be wrong. But, if it runs like a solid machine with 10.8, I'm not sure we could draw that conclusion.
 
RandomCitizen said:
Honestly, I agree. It almost sounds like something would HAVE to be wrong. But, if it runs like a solid machine with 10.8, I'm not sure we could draw that conclusion.
Click to expand...


That's true, if it's runs well with 10.8 then it doesn't sound like a hardware issue to me. Something in 10.9 isn't doing what it's supposed to do.

Oh well, at least you're good to go running 10.8. I know there's not much I would miss if I went back to 10.8 on my Macs.
 
About noon I started downloading Mavericks after cloning my ML startup which is a SSD. Four hours later it is still downloading, up to 4.62GB according to Activity Monitor, and I have a hi-speed internet connection. This alone makes me wonder whether I should install the update. :mad:
 
Hold out until 10.9.2, it's been really stable for me on both of my Core 2 Duo systems.

That said they were both fine on .0 and .1 as well. The core 2's are still plenty capable. It's more than likely that some other 3rd party apps are causing you problems.

I'd also check for a potential HDD failure. http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php is the best tool for the job.
 
He folks, I think I found the problem.

TRIM

This is how I figured this out:
Back in the summer, I dropped my MBP and I put up with a cracked screen until early February. I used my wife's 2012 MBA 13" until my MBP came back from the repair guy I used on Staten Island, NY. Btw, it was fantastic service and took a week and a half to turn it around.

During that time, I became incredibly used to a lightening fast computer with an i7 processor.

When my computer came back, it was so slow, I couldn't bear it anymore. Remember, at this point, Mavericks is off of the computer and I'm back on 10.8.

It was like sludge.

I called support at Crucial where I got my SSD. I asked, "This has to be a RAM or SSD problem, how can I diagnose it." The guy essentially proceeded to blow me away. I've been around computers for 25 years and I've never heard of TRIM, evidently it's a feature for SSD drives.

As prescribed, I rebooted into my drive selection screen (holding OPTION) at reboot. If you leave the MBP at that screen, there can be no reading or writing to and from the drive(s), therefore the drive will internally activate TRIM and it will start "garbage collection." Garbage collection is simply getting rid of deleted files.

You have to leave this on the boot screen for 24 hours. It can be six hours at a time, but 24 or so hours (depending on how bad it is) will do the trick. I left mine on for an afternoon, played with it for an hour and was unsatisfied. Then I left it on over night, about 12 hours, and it was incredibly better. The next night, I left it on overnight again, and it runs like a beast.

I have successfully reinstalled Mavericks and have little to no issues with speed.
 
TRIM and Garbage Collection are two different things. The advice about garbage collection and the startup screen sounds about right, since GC doesn't kick in unless the drive is idle. I think there have been some posts about the Crucial drives being a little slow to implement GC, but leaving your mac at the drive selection screen overnight is not a hardship, so great advice.

As for Trim, this is a SATA command that lets the SSD know that a file has been deleted, and the cells associated with the file can be emptied. It works together with garbage collection to keep the drive's performance up, but does so without the need for idle time. Since Apple does not implement Trim on third party drives, you either have to rely on GC, as you have done, or use a method to turn Trim on for such drives. I personally use Trim Enabler, created by Cindori, a long time poster on MacRumors forums. Some people disagree whether Trim is necessary, but I personally use it.
 
lssmit02 said:
As for Trim, this is a SATA command that lets the SSD know that a file has been deleted, and the cells associated with the file can be emptied. It works together with garbage collection to keep the drive's performance up, but does so without the need for idle time. Since Apple does not implement Trim on third party drives, you either have to rely on GC, as you have done, or use a method to turn Trim on for such drives. I personally use Trim Enabler, created by Cindori, a long time poster on MacRumors forums. Some people disagree whether Trim is necessary, but I personally use it.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the clarifications. I don't suppose myself to be an expert, I was just explaining it the best way I could.

As far as TRIM Enabler. I purchased this as well and for the long term find it a great tool to handle this issue.

Thanks again,
 
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