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schwine1

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 13, 2008
183
4
I have a Mac Pro tower with Snow Leopard, and there is a long delay, sometimes 5-6 seconds long, before files open up after being clicked on within the Finder window. The delay happens with any file, such as a MS Word file, .jpg file, .pdf file, whatever. The result is always the same - a long delay before the file opens. It doesn't seem to matter if the file is large in size or not. Before the Mac Pro I had a G5 and it opened files much faster than this brand new Mac Pro.

Is there a fix for this problem?
Thanks for any tips.
 
I see this to some extent and it wouldn't appear to be a hardware or memory problem, but may more likely be related to some add on or extension that is taking time to load.
 
I've had this problem on my aluminum MacBook for weeks (really horrendous Finder performance with ridiculous amounts of lag -- it started either immediately or shortly after I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard). I posted a topic on it awhile back and didn't have any luck finding any solutions. As I said, it seems like it should be a conflict with some installed software, but as far as I know I've installed exactly the same set of software on my other computer (an iMac i7) which exhibits none of these symptoms. If I had to guess, I'd imagine that reinstalling Snow Leopard would likely fix the problem, but that's a big enough hassle that I haven't found the time to try it on my machine. My MacBook seems to be 100% fine apart from the godawful Finder issues, so I'm pretty baffled by the problem. I'm sure that it's a Finder problem and not a hard disk problem, because everything is perfectly snappy when I do it in Terminal, it's just doing stuff through Finder that sucks rocks.

If you have any luck fixing this (with or without reinstalling Snow Leopard), do let me know.
 
I'm suspecting either a "services" extension, some customization or add on that is refreshing upon launching a finder window. Once launched changing directories within the window is instantaneous however. Do you have anything other than the default items on the finder toolbar? I also have a fat storage drive shortcut on the sidebar. I have a houdaspot icon and maybe one or two others. I have a clean SL install on the same mac pro on a different partition so I;ll see if that has the same issue.
 
Make Adjustment in Finder Preferences

Navigate to: Finder - Preferences - General.

At the bottom either un-check "Spring-loaded folders and windows" or move the slider to the "Short" end.

This remedy seems to be working for now.

A note at the bottom of the General window within Finder Preferences also says: "Press the space bar to open immediately."

I find the space bar often works but not every time. At times I have to re-try the space bar option. But, in general, the space bar is quite fast to open files (when it works!).
 
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