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absolutic

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 5, 2008
127
1
my iMac 2010 (2.8 iCore 5, 8GB Ram) which I was very happy with, started to run very slow and it is killing me (and my wife). It happened approximately after I installed Lion, but I cannot time exactly to Lion installation. It is like processor is struggling or not enough Ram but it is plenty of Ram. All the sudden iMovie takes forever with every job. The same types of 1080p video play choppy on VLC player and freeze. Every few minutes when I am on the internet (either use Safari or Google chrome) iMac would freeze for 5-10 seconds and then starting to operate again. When I am working with photos on Adobe Lightroom, when I go from photo to photo, it takes a few seconds to open photos, which has never happened before. I am not using any new programs that I have before. What do you think happened? How can I fix it? Or do I need to take to the Genius Bar? It would be a pain because I use it every day.
 
sounds like something happened with the Lion install.
how does it run safe booted.
how does it perform with a different user?

although time consuming -- can you clone, reformat, then clone back

a visit to the apple store only takes an hour or so.
 
sounds like something happened with the Lion install.
how does it run safe booted.
how does it perform with a different user?

although time consuming -- can you clone, reformat, then clone back

a visit to the apple store only takes an hour or so.

all good questions, I've never ran it in safety booting. How do you safety boot a Mac?
 
Help >> How do I safe boot?

Done that and it does not help. I am gonna make sure everything is backed up by Time Machine and I want to do a reinstall of Snow Leopard from the boot disks which hopefully came with my iMac and see if it fixes it, and if it does, I won't upgrade to Lion again
 
Done that and it does not help. I am gonna make sure everything is backed up by Time Machine and I want to do a reinstall of Snow Leopard from the boot disks which hopefully came with my iMac and see if it fixes it, and if it does, I won't upgrade to Lion again

Did you do a clean install of Lion or simply install on top of Snow Leopard? Before you do a clean install of Snow Leopard try a clean install of Lion. Lion runs great on my 2009 Mac-Mini, 2009 MacBook Pro and my 2011 iMac. I did do a clean install on each computer. You might have something installed from Snow Leopard that is causing the issue.

Also, try a PRAM reset and see if that helps.
 
Did you do a clean install of Lion or simply install on top of Snow Leopard? Before you do a clean install of Snow Leopard try a clean install of Lion. Lion runs great on my 2009 Mac-Mini, 2009 MacBook Pro and my 2011 iMac. I did do a clean install on each computer. You might have something installed from Snow Leopard that is causing the issue.

Also, try a PRAM reset and see if that helps.

I simply downloaded and installed on top of snow leopard. How do I do a clean install? Sorry for stupid questions, I've a fairly recent convert to Mac, had Pc all my life, but changed to all Apple in the last couple of years and loved every moment of it, except with this issue, it reminded me of the PC days...
 
Have you tried "Repair disk permission"? Searach on Google if you don't know what it is.

Also, when did you install Lion? I think it might be to do with the Spotlight is indexing all you files. Click on the right top conner and see if it's doing anything.
I don't think you need to reinstall at this stage.
 
Have you tried "Repair disk permission"? Searach on Google if you don't know what it is.

Also, when did you install Lion? I think it might be to do with the Spotlight is indexing all you files. Click on the right top conner and see if it's doing anything.
I don't think you need to reinstall at this stage.

I installed Lion shortly after it became available. I dont remember if I did repair disk permission. I'll do it again
 
alright, first of all, how much ram do you consider to be "enough"? second of all, what gpu do you have? the gpu has a lot to do with how fast your pc is
 
That has a laptop 6770m, basically a desktop radeon hd 5770. Should be powerful enough to run that stuff (unless the video ram is gddr3). The video ram is a little low though. almost no cards are 512mb anymore. Try opening up your case and see if it's covered with dust. Dust WILL cause your hardware to overheat and perform poorly. That's all I can think of.
 
That has a laptop 6770m, basically a desktop radeon hd 5770. Should be powerful enough to run that stuff (unless the video ram is gddr3). The video ram is a little low though. almost no cards are 512mb anymore. Try opening up your case and see if it's covered with dust. Dust WILL cause your hardware to overheat and perform poorly. That's all I can think of.

This is video specs:
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5750 1024 MB
 
idk do macs have defrag or anything? If you don't take care of your harddrive, the performance will decrease and can cause some slowdowns. Try defragging it and tell me if that works.
 
I have a 2010 iMac i3 and my lion upgrade worked fine so something definitely isn't right.

have you updated to 10.7.1? It may not make a difference but trying to rule out stuff.
 
Sounds like something got jacked with your Lion install. Don't worry so much because nothing is wrong with your computer. I suggest reinstalling Lion to see if that fixes the problem. If not, create a new user and try running Safari, iMovie and the other programs you were having issues with and see if the problems persist under the new user account.
 
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