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Inexplicable Mac slowdowns and lag

S

samleung

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 19, 2009
29
0
My aluminum MacBook running Lion has been serving me well until about the last month when it started getting non responsive and slow. Simple tasks such as opening folders or switching between spaces would take upon to 5 minutes, rendering the computer practically unusable. However, when running Windows via bootcamp, thee are no issues. I have checked everything available in Disk Utility but no joy.

I have reinstalled the computer, downgraded to Snow Leopard, wiped hard drive, installed Lion, but the issue remains, Again, running Windows in bootcamp is completely okay.

I'm at a loss here and can use any help and/or advice.

Sam
 
samleung said:
My aluminum MacBook running Lion has been serving me well until about the last month when it started getting non responsive and slow. Simple tasks such as opening folders or switching between spaces would take upon to 5 minutes, rendering the computer practically unusable. However, when running Windows via bootcamp, thee are no issues. I have checked everything available in Disk Utility but no joy.

I have reinstalled the computer, downgraded to Snow Leopard, wiped hard drive, installed Lion, but the issue remains, Again, running Windows in bootcamp is completely okay.

I'm at a loss here and can use any help and/or advice.

Sam
Click to expand...

Performance Tips For Mac OS X

Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes", then click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top). Also, click on the System Memory tab at the bottom. Then take a screen shot, scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot and post them.
 
Screen Shot 2012-04-15 at 3.00.18 AM.png

Here it is. I don't know what it could be, I have a clean install as of yesterday.
 
samleung said:
View attachment 335758
Sorry I missed the last part about the tab. Thanks!
Click to expand...
Nothing looks to be consuming much in the way of system resources, and you're not showing any paging activity. Did you run through the tips I posted earlier? From what you've shown so far, there doesn't appear to be anything that would cause slow performance.
 
GGJstudios said:
Nothing looks to be consuming much in the way of system resources, and you're not showing any paging activity. Did you run through the tips I posted earlier? From what you've shown so far, there doesn't appear to be anything that would cause slow performance.
Click to expand...

Yea I am scratching my head over this. The fact that this problem has replicated itself over two clean installs, while Windows runs well in bootcamp, has me baffled.
 
samleung said:
Yea I am scratching my head over this. The fact that this problem has replicated itself over two clean installs, while Windows runs well in bootcamp, has me baffled.
Click to expand...
Again, did you run though the tips in my first post?
 
GGJstudios said:
Again, did you run though the tips in my first post?
Click to expand...

Yes I did and I optimize all my systems the best I can. I hope my lack of a presence on MacRumors (and hence the "newbie" under my username) isn't giving you the idea that I don't know my way around computers. I service Mac and PC's and took this question to the boards in hoping that someone might catch something I didn't.

Thanks
 
samleung said:
I hope my lack of a presence on MacRumors (and hence the "newbie" under my username) isn't giving you the idea that I don't know my way around computers.
Click to expand...
Not at all. I make no such assumptions. I came to MR years ago with decades of computer experience, so I don't equate "newbie" with "computer illiterate". Also, many come here with Windows experience and are relatively new to Macs. I'm just looking for anything that might have been overlooked or that might help.
 
I've heard of people getting really bad beach balls when their RAM goes bad but if you have no problems on windows with the same RAM idk.
 
New update: in comparison to my previous attempts at remedying this issue, my Macbook is running much more smoothly. There are still hang ups and lags, but it's significantly more usable than before.

However, opening the Mail.app causes my entire system to freeze down and inexplicably makes my system run at snail pace.
 
samleung said:
New update: in comparison to my previous attempts at remedying this issue, my Macbook is running much more smoothly. There are still hang ups and lags, but it's significantly more usable than before.

However, opening the Mail.app causes my entire system to freeze down and inexplicably makes my system run at snail pace.
Click to expand...

Glad to hear you've managed to make the system run a little smoother. It sounds like it's more of a software issue in light of the Windows comment. If it is software based (rather than hardware, which it sounds like) you may be able to find additional information or clues by searching the OS X Lion portion of the forums and reviewing what others have done regarding slowdowns. You should still attempt to exhaust the advice and links provided by GGJ if you haven't yet.

https://forums.macrumors.com/search/?searchid=27392087

If worst comes to worst, Apple is releasing an update to Lion soon that may help to resolve possible conflicts between your system and the current release of Lion. There is also the option of opting for other versions of OS X.

Double check to make sure you are updated to the most recent version of Lion (10.7.3) and all updates via software update (under the apple menu) are installed. I've found that the client combo on 10.7.3 has helped quite a bit as far as performance goes, over earlier versions. You may want to check this out, possibly install it if you have not yet.

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1484
 
Check your disk I/O. I was at the apple store testing out some of the macbooks there, heavy disk I/O even stalled the latest 17'' macbook pro, took like 1 minute to load a safari webpage. only the air with its SSD was able to keep chugging along.

Also I see that mds guy in your list. that and mdworker are the spotlight indexers that will be taxing your disk.
 
Another (and hopefully final) update: my mac has again slowed to an unusable state, and I am forced to use Bootcamp and run Windows for my day-to-day needs. I simply do not have the time to deal with this as I'm in school.

Perplexed as ever, but I thank you all for your help.
 
samleung said:
Another (and hopefully final) update: my mac has again slowed to an unusable state, and I am forced to use Bootcamp and run Windows for my day-to-day needs. I simply do not have the time to deal with this as I'm in school.

Perplexed as ever, but I thank you all for your help.
Click to expand...

Eh, if you didn't have anything on that side I'd just do a fresh install of Snow Leopard instead of Lion. But anyways good luck and no problem.
 
Just an update for those who are interested: I've been using Windows 7 for a while now and that crashed and never booted. Again. I have a spare hard drive lying around and I tossed it in and I'm running Lion right now. It seems to be running okay so far for about half a day but only time will tell.
 
So it's been 4 days and my system is running great! I will make the conclusion that my harddrive has bad sectors and I will look into fixing that.
 
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