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Anyone annoyed with "slowness" of their MBP?

J

jon08

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 14, 2008
1,894
110
Ok well, generally it's obviously not bad but still, 4 months ago when switching from a C2D 1.8 Ghz 2GB RAM Windows laptop to MBP, I expected that everything should be real fast and smooth on OS-X with decent specifications that the MBP I bought offers (refer to my siggy for the specs).

However, I'm quite annoyed with the following:

1. Esp. after switching it on when it was shut down - when the desktop loads the disk tends to keep "grinding" for a while (but in some sort of intervals, not continually). Opening Firefox will take 20 (!) secs to finally load and open the homepage!! (while Safari takes like 3-4 secs MOST)

2. Applies to no. 1 again - except it's when opening Finder and Apps, at times it will take 2-3 secs to display those 57 apps I have. Why? I would expect it to load RIGHT AWAY.

3. Flash along with some other Firefox features having issues, frequently resulting in beach ball - all in all seems slower slower than in Windows.


Is it just me or is anyone else annoyed with these? It feels as though everything on Mac revolved around the speed of the HD, while on Windows it was more about how much RAM you have, that's why I get the feeling that I haven't really benefited much in terms of speed when switching to Mac?
 
Regarding firefox, i would dowload firefox 3.5 beta 4. its much faster than firefox 3 and is working great for me.
 
Hard disk drives have been the bottleneck of personal computers for a long time, regardless of whether you're talking about PC or Mac. If your windows machine is slow because of the amount of RAM, then it just means it wasn't enough. Install more RAM, and your HDD will be the slowest component.
 
1. You don't have to use firefox in OSX.

2. It doesn't take 2 or 3 seconds to display 130 apps on my MBP. It's instantenous.

Do you run torrents?

3. Flash player is poorly made for OSX. Complain to Adobe.

Again, you don't have to use firefox in OSX.
 
I was also a little disappointed at first but then I realized that no matter how fast the computer, the harddrive is always the slowest part. Just because it loads the application icons slowly doesn't mean it can't play Crysis. :cool:
 
Consultant said:
1. You don't have to use firefox in OSX.

2. It doesn't take 2 or 3 seconds to display 130 apps on my MBP. It's instantenous.

Do you run torrents?

3. Flash player is poorly made for OSX. Complain to Adobe.

Again, you don't have to use firefox in OSX.
Click to expand...

Have you tried to open Finder-Apps List right off restarting/turning on your comp? That's when at times I experience the 2-3 secs thing. Oh, and I do run torrents, but not every day.

I know I don't have to use Firefox. But I just happen to like it better than Safari, because: a) when you click the address bar in FF, it will highlight the entire address right away, unlike in Safari when you need to click your mouse 3x to get the entire address highlighted b) where is a REFRESH button in Safari? c) AdBlock Plus in FF

These prevent me from using Safari..it's just that I'm too used to these features to really want to switch to Safari...
 
jon08 said:
Have you tried to open Finder-Apps List right off restarting/turning on your comp? That's when at times I experience the 2-3 secs thing. Oh, and I do run torrents, but not every day.

I know I don't have to use Firefox. But I just happen to like it better than Safari, because: a) when you click the address bar in FF, it will highlight the entire address right away, unlike in Safari when you need to click your mouse 3x to get the entire address highlighted b) where is a REFRESH button in Safari? c) AdBlock Plus in FF

These prevent me from using Safari..it's just that I'm too used to these features to really want to switch to Safari...
Click to expand...

if you are using safari 4 the refresh button is now next to the RSS logo in the address bar. safari 3.x sometimes you have to add it from the view menu>customize toolbar.
 
jon08 said:
Have you tried to open Finder-Apps List right off restarting/turning on your comp? That's when at times I experience the 2-3 secs thing. Oh, and I do run torrents, but not every day.
Click to expand...

Every computer requires a few (10) seconds to get itself in order and start up all the hidden processes. Dashboard, all the components in your menu bar, etc. must be started as well. So saying it takes forever as soon as your computer is turned on makes sense. If you said it was this slow after a few minutes of starting I would say you should worry.
 
I have a 8-9 month old Macbook Pro and it runs great. Just upgraded to 4 GB Ram. I custom ordered the MPB just because I wanted the faster 7200 RPM drive. I run Firefox 3 and don't have any problems with Firefox being slow or with Flash.

Although my screen has been flickering (certain apps) today. Which is strange.
 
jon08 said:
However, I'm quite annoyed with the following:

1. Esp. after switching it on when it was shut down - when the desktop loads the disk tends to keep "grinding" for a while (but in some sort of intervals, not continually). Opening Firefox will take 20 (!) secs to finally load and open the homepage!! (while Safari takes like 3-4 secs MOST)
Click to expand...
It's been my experience that when you first boot any OS, it's always slow for a minute or two after the desktop appears. There's a lot of stuff that happens "behind the scenes" the first minute or two after a system boots, even though the OS has already shown you the desktop. The disk is already busy, so when you start clicking on anything, it's going to take longer than if the system wasn't doing post-boot crap in the background.

That's why I love how well OS X does sleep on laptops. I put my Mac to sleep 100x more than I shut it down/have to wait for it to boot and go thru the post-boot crap. This is different than how I handled my Windows laptops.

2. Applies to no. 1 again - except it's when opening Finder and Apps, at times it will take 2-3 secs to display those 57 apps I have. Why? I would expect it to load RIGHT AWAY.
Click to expand...
Again, the hard drive, right after a reboot, is busy doing post-boot things. So when Finder is asking the drive to go fetch everything to display your view, it's going to take longer than normal. Especially if Finder is show you the "LIST" view where it shows how big the application is (because it takes a fair amount of time to add up the size of each of the subfiles in an application).


Is it just me or is anyone else annoyed with these? It feels as though everything on Mac revolved around the speed of the HD, while on Windows it was more about how much RAM you have, that's why I get the feeling that I haven't really benefited much in terms of speed when switching to Mac?
Click to expand...
OS X kicks butt at caching with RAM. The thing is, Windows or Mac, right after you just reboot, it takes time to load stuff into RAM before it can remain cached.

I guess the question is, why are you restarting your Mac notebook so frequently?
 
^^ Thanks for your input, aristobrat. It makes sense that the "behind the scenes" processes and whatnot would take a while to load after the OS has already shown the desktop. I guess it's just that my expectations about the OS-X were overly high, thinking that as soon as it boots into your desktop it would be ready to go, as opposed to Windows.

To answer your last question: in fact, most of the time I do use the sleep mode on my MBP, but I as well like to turn it off or restart it a couple of times a week. I guess it's just a habit of wanting to be "on the safe side", perhaps based on the belief that it would boost its performance etc.

Another thing I was wondering: why is there no chime sometimes when I restart my laptop?
 
jon08 said:
Another thing I was wondering: why is there no chime sometimes when I restart my laptop?
Click to expand...

The chime is directly affected by the sound of the internal speakers. If your volume is muted on a newer Mac (intels for the most part) you will not hear the chime.

If, however, your volume is up and you don't hear the chime, then you might want to reset your PRAM.

After that, some older Macs can play the chime through external speakers, but that won't be the case with a MBP. For example, if you have headphones plugged in, and you mute the sound, it will mute the external devices volume, yet the machine will still chime from the internal speakers when you boot (unless you go into the System Prefs and manually lower the internal speakers volume when there is an external plugged in).
 
The chime depends if you have speakers muted before you shut down.

On a note about Firefox being slow (on uMBP) - i also noticed that for the first time I open it regardless if I have waited for the OS to finish loading or not it still takes a good 10 - 15 bounces. With safari it is practically instantaneous. I'd say that this is comparable, not better, performance to a 4/5 year old PB G4 listing in the sig.

I've also been getting a hell of a lot spinning rainbows in firefox recently. None in Safari.

It's a shame that FF seems to be flawed because the UI is in my opinion better than Safari.

Any ideas why the performance is so poor in FF?
 
I notice the same issues on my unibody MBP. The biggest change you can make NOW to your system is to acquire an SSD drive. I have a 120GB Vertex in there now, and even a simple backup and restore of my current OS to the drive fixed all the lagginess. The HD is the slowest part of your MBP. The faster SSD drops in price, the better our systems will run.
 
jon08 said:
I guess it's just that my expectations about the OS-X were overly high, thinking that as soon as it boots into your desktop it would be ready to go, as opposed to Windows.
Click to expand...
My MBP definitely still has a lag for a bit after initially showing the desktop (just like Windows), but the overall boot-time (from when I press the power key until the desktop appears) of my MBP is still a good 30-40 seconds faster than any Windows laptop I've ever owned. :)

Albal said:
Any ideas why the performance is so poor in FF?
Click to expand...
In regards to speed of launching, I think Firefox goes out and checks to see if there are any new updates each time you start it up.

AFAIK, Safari doesn't check for updates when you start it; it lets the Mac's Software Update feature do that.
 
madog said:
The chime is directly affected by the sound of the internal speakers. If your volume is muted on a newer Mac (intels for the most part) you will not hear the chime.

If, however, your volume is up and you don't hear the chime, then you might want to reset your PRAM.

After that, some older Macs can play the chime through external speakers, but that won't be the case with a MBP. For example, if you have headphones plugged in, and you mute the sound, it will mute the external devices volume, yet the machine will still chime from the internal speakers when you boot (unless you go into the System Prefs and manually lower the internal speakers volume when there is an external plugged in).
Click to expand...

Hm, well I didn't have my speakers on mute when I restarted my computer today and there was NO chime...and I've experienced it a couple of times before, too. Should I be worried?

p.s.: I keep my MBP connected to the AUX jack of my Hi-fi system (it was turned on tho).
 
aristobrat said:
My MBP definitely still has a lag for a bit after initially showing the desktop (just like Windows), but the overall boot-time (from when I press the power key until the desktop appears) of my MBP is still a good 30-40 seconds faster than any Windows laptop I've ever owned. :)
Click to expand...

How long does it usually take from the moment you pressed the On/Off button till the moment you get the glance of your desktop wallpaper? I usually get around 40 secs, sometimes a bit more sometimes slightly less. Depends..
 
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