Is it just me or Maverick(s) Sucks?

[MagnusVonMagnum]

I agree.

Running ex. Handbrake in background makes Finder useless ... sooo slooow ... now it seems like wasted money buing a brand new macmini w 10.9

Compared with my old macmini running 10.6 it's horrible (doing the same thing) finder is still snappy.

Anyone know what the diff is, seem that apple put finder on "nice" prio

/Alpez

I have no idea what you're talking about. I have a 2012 Mac Mini and I'm running 10.9.1 and my Finder does not become useless when running Handbrake. It might be a tad slower loading up icon images, etc. as the hard drive has to share its time between reading/writing the movie being compressed and loading whatever it is in the background, but the file lists themselves come up almost instantly and not long for the rest.

What's slow exactly in Finder? Everything? Which Mac Mini did you get? Admittedly, I've got a Quad Core i7 with 8GB ram and my dual hard drives have been made RAID0 (I get hard drive speeds around 260-280MB/sec), but Handbrake uses all four cores (eight threads) during rendering. It just sounds to me like there might be something else going on, but I can't imagine what, offhand.

 

[alpez]

I have no idea what you're talking about. I have a 2012 Mac Mini and I'm running 10.9.1 and my Finder does not become useless when running Handbrake. It might be a tad slower loading up icon images, etc. as the hard drive has to share its time between reading/writing the movie being compressed and loading whatever it is in the background, but the file lists themselves come up almost instantly and not long for the rest.

What's slow exactly in Finder? Everything? Which Mac Mini did you get? Admittedly, I've got a Quad Core i7 with 8GB ram and my dual hard drives have been made RAID0 (I get hard drive speeds around 260-280MB/sec), but Handbrake uses all four cores (eight threads) during rendering. It just sounds to me like there might be something else going on, but I can't imagine what, offhand.

Hi

2,5 ghz i5 model

everything is slow, when handbrake's running in the background.

ex. moving not copying some files from one folder to another kan take 30 secs.

/Alpez

 

[iCole]

So far didn't notice a lot of bugs. Sometimes my mouse loses signal for a couple of seconds, only when I come out of sleep I believe. It's been a while so I even can't remember anymore. Speed has been pretty good, maybe a little bit better compaired to Mountain Lion and about WARP 5 times faster than Lion. Now, Lion... that was an unpolished mess.

 

[Twimfy]

10.9.2 will cheer a lot of you up. A lot of bugs have been fixed and the performance is greatly improved.

Heat is still an issue for me a my CPU does seem a little choked but I'm putting that down to the extra overheads that often accompany betas.

 

[alpez]

10.9.2 will cheer a lot of you up. A lot of bugs have been fixed and the performance is greatly improved.

Heat is still an issue for me a my CPU does seem a little choked but I'm putting that down to the extra overheads that often accompany betas.

Hi

It help's to renice cpu hogging processes.

Wonder why Window's is so easy on that point ctrl+alt+esc to change priority.

On an mac ... somewhat trickier ... ps aux renice ... etc

Is there a way so that an app always launches at low prio ?

like in the info.plist or ... ?

/Alpez

 

[dyrer]

10.9.2 will cheer a lot of you up. A lot of bugs have been fixed and the performance is greatly improved.

Heat is still an issue for me a my CPU does seem a little choked but I'm putting that down to the extra overheads that often accompany betas.

Can wait for upcomming 10.9.2, may they release with iOS 7.1

 

[barkmonster]

To test if it worked, I cloned my 10.6.8 OS from 1 drive to the other internal drive, repaired permissions, installed Mavericks on it, rebooted. Noticed none of my software worked any more because it broke the copy protection and I use such old software the only updates are for more recent versions costing £100s, then I noticed they'd removed the ability to add smart folders as short cuts to the tool bar in the Finder so I restarted back into my other drive that still had Snow Leopard on it.

Instant kernel panic, during the install of Mavericks on the cloned system, it managed to destroy permission on that drive too so it was inaccessible without using several UNIX commands I was lucky enough to find on line. That was after not being able to boot from anything apart from the recovery partition and having to clone a back up of my Snow Leopard boot drive back to it because whatever settings my Mac had to decide which boot drive to use was so messed up by the Mavericks install, the only explanation is the boot loader on disk1 was pointing to disk0 and vice versa.

I'm sticking with snow leopard till further notice, not least because even 10.8.5 no longer allows me to view mounted ISO files of PC installer software for use with WINE. In Snow Leopard, it throws up the dialog "This disk cannot be read", yet mounts it anyway. Then the disk shows up as a CDFS format CD/DVD drive in the file manager of WINE and can install the software (or in the case of Rebirth, authorise it with the CD it uses for copy protection despite being a free product). I am unable to reproduce this behaviour in either Mavericks or Mountain Lion so I'm stuck having to either use Snow Leopard as my boot OS and have Mountain Lion (at the most) on an external disk for running more recent software.

In addition to this is copy protection for Mac-native software I use that stubbornly refuses to stop asking for re-authorisation in Mavericks, yet runs like a dream in earlier versions.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

To test if it worked, I cloned my 10.6.8 OS from 1 drive to the other internal drive

Cloned it with what? The problems you seem to have on restoring Snow Leopard make no sense at all with something like CCC as you couldn't possibly have an issue using it assuming you booted off the cloned drove and then copied back. I've done it with a blank drive in the internal slot to install a larger internal drive in my MBP and it worked fine.

I'm curious what software you're using that has copy protection on it that can't handle an OS upgrade. You mentioned WINE in there so I have no idea what you're doing with your computer, but the self-contained environment in WINE shouldn't care what MAC OS you have. I'm running Diablo2 (since the Mac version no longer works being PPC native) in Mavericks just fine over from Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, for example and it's Wine based. Generally speaking, though I use VMWare for WinXP and Win98 gaming.

, repaired permissions, installed Mavericks on it, rebooted. Noticed none of my software worked any more because it broke the copy protection and I

You see..."NONE of your old software". What the heck are you running that NONE of it works in Mavericks? I've got HUNDREDS of Apps here and they ALL work in Mavericks and no, most of them are not from the App Center.

I mean it sounds like your Mavericks install never worked at all (only the recovery one you said) so why would everything work correctly when recovery isn't exactly normal to use as a regular OS. It sounds like Mavericks simply didn't install right for some reason unknown. There simply isn't enough information to even guess what you or it did wrong.

 

[barkmonster]

Cloned it with what? The problems you seem to have on restoring Snow Leopard make no sense at all with something like CCC as you couldn't possibly have an issue using it assuming you booted off the cloned drove and then copied back. I've done it with a blank drive in the internal slot to install a larger internal drive in my MBP and it worked fine.

I'm curious what software you're using that has copy protection on it that can't handle an OS upgrade. You mentioned WINE in there so I have no idea what you're doing with your computer, but the self-contained environment in WINE shouldn't care what MAC OS you have. I'm running Diablo2 (since the Mac version no longer works being PPC native) in Mavericks just fine over from Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, for example and it's Wine based. Generally speaking, though I use VMWare for WinXP and Win98 gaming.



You see..."NONE of your old software". What the heck are you running that NONE of it works in Mavericks? I've got HUNDREDS of Apps here and they ALL work in Mavericks and no, most of them are not from the App Center.

I mean it sounds like your Mavericks install never worked at all (only the recovery one you said) so why would everything work correctly when recovery isn't exactly normal to use as a regular OS. It sounds like Mavericks simply didn't install right for some reason unknown. There simply isn't enough information to even guess what you or it did wrong.

I'll clarify NONE OF THE SOFTWARE THAT'S WORTHLESS WITHOUT PARING IT WITH EVERY OTHER APPLICATION I USE IT WITH WORKS under Mavericks. I couldn't care less if the basic OS apps work, the music software doesn't (apart from Pro Tools).

Reason 5 kept claiming to need reinstalling under Mavericks and I can't afford the upgrade to 7 yet for compatibility. THIS IS A NATIVE MAC OS X APP. No version of Mac OS X above 10.6.8 (including Snow Leopard server in a virtual machine) will mount a PC ISO file or even the same ISO burned to CD and WINE won't see it as a CDFS disc if you create a virtual CD from a folder in it's settings either. I DID use Carbon Copy Cloner too! That's how I cloned the OS from 1 disk to the other while retaining all the files on the second internal drive.

 

[petsounds]

The only problem with Mavericks I've been having (aside from minor bugs, and the annoying beachball that keeps showing up briefly) is crackling audio. I use an Apogee Ensemble for my audio interface, but it's always been rock solid. Actually, I noticed some audio glitching starting with 10.8.5 when the CPU was under load, but the Mavericks crackling is way worse.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

I'll clarify NONE OF THE SOFTWARE THAT'S WORTHLESS WITHOUT PARING IT WITH EVERY OTHER APPLICATION I USE IT WITH WORKS under Mavericks. I couldn't care less if the basic OS apps work, the music software doesn't (apart from Pro Tools).

Well, that clarifies everything. Not. So far, I know Reason 5 doesn't work in Mavericks, but a quick search tells me that not only does Reason 6 and 7 work fine in Mavericks, but if you install the Reason 7 free demo and run it and then start Reason 5, it supposedly starts working again in Mavericks for most people.

I don't use Reason so I can't verify this. I use Logic Pro 9 and it works just fine (and Logic X is dirt cheap now so I see no reason to pay $399 for Reason 7 when most of the reviews I've read said it sucks (no plugins, no video support and getting overly complicated are the main reasons I've read just now).

Reason 5 kept claiming to need reinstalling under Mavericks and I can't afford the upgrade to 7 yet for compatibility. THIS IS A NATIVE MAC OS X APP.

And it's Apple's fault that they haven't updated it to work with newer OS updates? Oh wait. They have. It's called Reason 6 & 7. If you can't afford a $129 upgrade, you're obviously not making money with it or it would be worth it just for newer features.

No version of Mac OS X above 10.6.8 (including Snow Leopard server in a virtual machine) will mount a PC ISO file or even the same ISO burned to CD and WINE won't see it as a CDFS disc if you create a virtual CD from a folder in it's settings either.

Yeah, that is strange. I just happen to have the PPC ISO for Diablo II here so I didn't need the discs and it won't even mount with Toast Titanium anymore (image not recognized). Given Apple's support for NTFS reading and Microsoft networking, it really makes no sense for them to be removing support for just mounting such formats even if you can't run them. Sometimes all you need is the manual or whatever. I think it's a good feedback item to Apple to address.

But in any case, downloading "The Unarchiver" from the App store allows me to extract the contents of such ISOs into a Mac OSX folder. That might not be good enough if a program needs to see it as a "disk", but it works for getting to text files, etc. stored on PC ISOs.

I'm sure if I ran VMWare, I could share them more easily. And VMWare is the reason I rarely touch Wine in the first place. It lets me run WinXP and Win98 in OSX even though they're not supported by BootCamp (no longer for XP and never for 98 and some games only run right under 98).

 

[barkmonster]

Well, that clarifies everything. Not. So far, I know Reason 5 doesn't work in Mavericks, but a quick search tells me that not only does Reason 6 and 7 work fine in Mavericks, but if you install the Reason 7 free demo and run it and then start Reason 5, it supposedly starts working again in Mavericks for most people.

I don't use Reason so I can't verify this. I use Logic Pro 9 and it works just fine (and Logic X is dirt cheap now so I see no reason to pay $399 for Reason 7 when most of the reviews I've read said it sucks (no plugins, no video support and getting overly complicated are the main reasons I've read just now).



And it's Apple's fault that they haven't updated it to work with newer OS updates? Oh wait. They have. It's called Reason 6 & 7. If you can't afford a $129 upgrade, you're obviously not making money with it or it would be worth it just for newer features.



Yeah, that is strange. I just happen to have the PPC ISO for Diablo II here so I didn't need the discs and it won't even mount with Toast Titanium anymore (image not recognized). Given Apple's support for NTFS reading and Microsoft networking, it really makes no sense for them to be removing support for just mounting such formats even if you can't run them. Sometimes all you need is the manual or whatever. I think it's a good feedback item to Apple to address.

But in any case, downloading "The Unarchiver" from the App store allows me to extract the contents of such ISOs into a Mac OSX folder. That might not be good enough if a program needs to see it as a "disk", but it works for getting to text files, etc. stored on PC ISOs.

I'm sure if I ran VMWare, I could share them more easily. And VMWare is the reason I rarely touch Wine in the first place. It lets me run WinXP and Win98 in OSX even though they're not supported by BootCamp (no longer for XP and never for 98 and some games only run right under 98).

Reason to me is nothing more than an infinite rack of software synths to Rewire into your DAW of choice. You've been reading some utterly biased, retarded and uninformed reviews if you think it lacks plugins. With Rewire, IT IS a plug-in (effectively). There's an ever-expanding range of FAR CHEAPER than AU/AAX/VST equivalents software synths and effect plugins in their Rack Extension format from Korg, Audiorealism, McDSP etc... for the more recent versions.

Even though I think you should reel in your ego and realise if I had any choice to be in a better financial position, I'd already have Logic X and Reason 7, I would have thought the tediously clique presumption that if someone can't currently afford software X or hardware Y at present, they're not "professional" like the egotist ranting at them about it claims to be themselves and they shouldn't even dare complaining would have run it's course so many times on here by now, people like yourself should have already realised how futile it is wasting their time making a fool of themselves.

As for Windows. Why bother? It's Apple who changed the way Mac OS X recognises ISO files after Snow Leopard and it's Apple who decided, even though it's a server OS and restricting compatibility lessens it's usefulness, they'd leave out ISO mounting compatibility with Snow Leopard server, then offer it at a price Snow Leopard users couldn't refuse when they plan on upgrading to a more recent OS that doesn't support it either, yet don't want to ditch older software or lose functionality.

It's all a matter of being in a financial position to afford £370 of software updates and actually having a NEED to upgrade past Snow Leopard in the first place. If something works, why break it just to use the latest OS?

The only issue I have is using an older, obsolete software synth with WINE as a work around for their abandonment of Mac OS X (Although they were quick to port it to iOS) and the fact software that DID work with Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, DOESN'T work with Mavericks and OS features that DID work with Snow Leopard for mounting ISO files, DON'T work with anything more recent than Snow Leopard.

 

[dylin]

poor playback with click to flash

Well, i made a partition specifically for Mavericks. And my main issue that I'm having with it has to do with "the click to flash" extension for safari.

It just doesn't respond as it did in previous versions of OSX.

When i first click the video it starts off with the flash thumbnail.

I have to refresh the page to get it to start playing in HTML5 with the "click to flash."

Other issues i have are when i click a new video, the previous video stays and doesn't change, also when i go fullscreen, and go exit out of fullscreen, the audio still plays even after leave that page. So I'm not exactly sure what is causing this problem.

All i want is to get it to run like it did in mountain lion and before. It seems like a small, nit picky issue, but it really does kill the experience. i guess that means i have to uninstall that extension for now.

I will keep updating when i find anything that conflicts with the user experience.

 

[dylin]

Update, "click to flash" doesn't have any problems in Gametrailers.com

So far, i just edited the list to let the others play without "click to flash"

 

[Piercussion]

Mavericks Sucks

I have to say Mavericks really does suck. For those of you that say it "works great"...YOU are in the minority. Everyone I know has had major problems. After working with Apple engineers, they couldn't figure out why processes were hanging and there was high CPU utilization. The Mail app sucks and the Finder is screwed up. It takes in upwards of 30 seconds for some files to display in certain directories. I've tried everything...upgrading from Mountain Lion and also doing a clean install.

What really pisses me off is that my hard drive failed about 2 months after upgrading to Mavericks. My guess is that because of the high utilization, both CPU and I/O, it damaged my hard drive for working so hard and overheating. I have another friend who upgraded to Mavericks and his hard drive ended up failing.

This is absolutely the WORST freaking OS Apple has put out and I am furious. I've lost data and countless hours of messing with this crap. Apple needs to come out with a fix soon.

 

[trewyn15]

Windows 8 Ratings > Mavericks Ratings

Let the flame war begin.

 

[dylin]

Windows 8 Ratings > Mavericks Ratings

Let the flame war begin.

i don't know about the ratings, but i will say i don't have as much of a hard time dealing with all the little things in windows 8.1.

 

[barkmonster]

I have to say Mavericks really does suck. For those of you that say it "works great"...YOU are in the minority. Everyone I know has had major problems. After working with Apple engineers, they couldn't figure out why processes were hanging and there was high CPU utilization. The Mail app sucks and the Finder is screwed up. It takes in upwards of 30 seconds for some files to display in certain directories. I've tried everything...upgrading from Mountain Lion and also doing a clean install.

What really pisses me off is that my hard drive failed about 2 months after upgrading to Mavericks. My guess is that because of the high utilization, both CPU and I/O, it damaged my hard drive for working so hard and overheating. I have another friend who upgraded to Mavericks and his hard drive ended up failing.

This is absolutely the WORST freaking OS Apple has put out and I am furious. I've lost data and countless hours of messing with this crap. Apple needs to come out with a fix soon.

I couldn't agree more. It's a train wreck for so many people, it's almost as if there's a fanboy element turning a blind eye to problems they're experiencing because they can't admit Apple could ever do anything wrong.

 

[LostSoul80]

Guys, please. Everything sucks compared to SL.

 

[smokesletsgo]

Totally agree. Never had so many problems on my macbook air... Im seriously considering downgrading to Mountain Lion (or should I say upgrading??), it was perfect compared to this pile of ... Safari bugs, spinning beach balls, flash hangs, wtf Apple? Releasing some **** (tbh) just because a year passed? Better improve ML or release something new when its really ready. No wonder it's free.

Also still waiting for Safari updates... No updates since the release. LOL. When it's clearly like in Alpha stage or something, i just can't believe this. Even Windows have never disappointed me that much.

 

[ABC5S]

I have to say Mavericks really does suck. For those of you that say it "works great"...YOU are in the minority. Everyone I know has had major problems. After working with Apple engineers, they couldn't figure out why processes were hanging and there was high CPU utilization. The Mail app sucks and the Finder is screwed up. It takes in upwards of 30 seconds for some files to display in certain directories. I've tried everything...upgrading from Mountain Lion and also doing a clean install.



This is absolutely the WORST freaking OS Apple has put out and I am furious. I've lost data and countless hours of messing with this crap. Apple needs to come out with a fix soon.

Prove it !

I just love those that say things that are down right lies

 

[torana355]

I always do a clean install when i upgrade my OS but for Mavericks i just did an upgrade on both my iMac and MBA. I was having multiple issues on both machines after the upgrade to Mavericks including very slow boot times, major scrolling issues in firefox and issues with finder taking forever to respond, i ended up doing a clean install on both machines last week and they have been running perfectly since. Mavericks is fine, it just requires a fresh install afaik.

 

[Piercussion]

I always do a clean install when i upgrade my OS but for Mavericks i just did an upgrade on both my iMac and MBA. I was having multiple issues on both machines after the upgrade to Mavericks including very slow boot times, major scrolling issues in firefox and issues with finder taking forever to respond, i ended up doing a clean install on both machines last week and they have been running perfectly since. Mavericks is fine, it just requires a fresh install afaik.

Torana,

It might have to do with how people actually use the Mac, including the apps and configuration of component. I would consider myself a "super user." I use Dropbox and Google Drive, shared drives, Parallels Desktop for VM. I have 8 Internet accounts registered for Mail, Contacts, and Calendar. Mail crashes a lot or is slow. This was a known issue with the first release of Mavericks. It's still not completely fixed.

Also, Finder is slow to list directory contents all the time. Never happened on Mountain Lion.

What type of user would you consider yourself? I work in software development so I push it to the limit. A casual user would most likely not have any problems and Mavericks would run smoothly.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

So now we have complaints about Safari not being updated OFTEN enough? What is wrong with it that it needs an update just to have an update? You want a LOT of updates, use Firefox. I like it better anyway and it supports older versions of OSX like Snow Leopard (you know the one that everyone claims was perfect but gets no Safari updates any longer and questionably any security updates either).

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Snow Leopard had some serious problems until at least 10.6.4. I simply didn't upgrade until that point due to all the issues. People FORGET so quickly that Snow Leopard wasn't perfect because they eventually got it right and it was around so long in the versions that did work, that everyone just gets this selective memory problem where they think all versions of OSX prior to the current one were just AWESOME and NEVER had any issues. It's a crock. Snow Leopard was a MINOR update and it still had issues early on.

The secret is to keep a BACKUP of the prior OS on an external drive or the like with something like Carbon Copy Cloner and if you don't like the new version, you can EASILY with a boot off the backup drive and a few button clicks RESTORE the prior OS version you liked better. Voila! It's so simple to do and yet all I see is WHINING and RANTING that 10.9.1 isn't working perfectly yet. We saw that with 10.9.0. It's as if people expect version 1.0 to be PERFECT these days. Well, Mountain Lion 10.8.4 had MAJOR problems and Mavericks was developed concurrently with some different people working on both at the same time. 10.8.5 seemed to work great here, but I see some people saying they still didn't like it, so I have no idea what makes their generic vanilla Macs (they don't make upgradeable ones anymore) so darn special that they don't work at all while the rest of us have minor issues at best.

For instance, I do think my 2008 Macbook Pro worked a bit faster under Mountain Lion (about same as Snow Leopard which was slower than Leopard) than Mavericks, but I can't say it's constant. I think some people don't realize that they may have power settings putting their hard drive to sleep, etc. in Mavericks where it sleeps much more often than prior OS versions and they're mistaking "slowness" from "too much disk activity" from the drive doing NOTHING and waking up from sleep on/off all day long because it will go to sleep within TWO MINUTES of non-activity in Mavericks. TURN "Put my hard drives to sleep when possible" OFF. Those "slowdowns" magically disappear. I have seen an odd beachball once in awhile on both my 2008 MBP and my 2012 Mac Mini, but it's less than a second. It's like a blinks. It may be slightly annoying, but it's hardly the end of the world (it will go busy big time if the hard drive has to spin back up). And yes that slowdown spinning it back up will make Finder seem slow as hell, but it's the hardware spinning back up, not Finder's fault so turn OFF hard drive sleeping if it's an issue. Trying to run Handbrake and copy huge files will cause an issue because the OS is trying to write to two different parts of the same hard drive at the same time (I use a second hard drive for media and don't have this issue). Actually, keeping a large USB drive for handbrake builds is a very good idea. A 64GB flash drive would work great. Just move the files off when they're done. I solved a Call of Duty slow-down issue that way where it would lose audio for a fraction of a second (annoying). So I ran the game off a flash drive and it ran perfectly smooth. Yes, there probably is some kind of OS issue there but it's there in Mountain Lion also.

But the idea of blaming Mavericks for ruining hard drives? A traditional rotational hard drive is a spinning platter with magnetic heads that move along a little track over the heads and none of it actually touches anything (since magnetic fields work through the air). Thus, there is almost no difference between a drive just sitting there doing nothing (assuming it's not sleeping which does cause the drive to stop spinning and thus it takes TIME to spin back up) and reading and writing save the movement of the heads over the platter. I find it difficult to imagine Mavericks being able to do anything to shorten a hard drive's life enough to ruin one within weeks. I've had drives going for TEN YEARS in some cases and there's nothing Mavericks could do to shorten that to 2 weeks just by moving the head a bit more than normal. It's called coincidence.

OTOH, I personally only see one reason to keep Mavericks over Mountain Lion and that is the improved multiple monitor support. If you don't use multiple monitors, I see no reason to rush into upgrading to Mavericks in the first place. If you do use multiple monitors, you're going to have to try it out and see if any annoyances are worth the improved support or not. Keep a backup handy. To me, nothing Mavericks has done (especially on my Mini where I use two monitors most of the time) is annoying enough for me to go back to Mountain Lion with its crappy multiple monitor support. And I'm sure 10.9.2 will fix many things as updates to OSX usually do. Some of you should have simply waited until most people declared Mavericks mostly bug free before updating.

 

[torana355]

Torana,

It might have to do with how people actually use the Mac, including the apps and configuration of component. I would consider myself a "super user." I use Dropbox and Google Drive, shared drives, Parallels Desktop for VM. I have 8 Internet accounts registered for Mail, Contacts, and Calendar. Mail crashes a lot or is slow. This was a known issue with the first release of Mavericks. It's still not completely fixed.

Also, Finder is slow to list directory contents all the time. Never happened on Mountain Lion.

What type of user would you consider yourself? I work in software development so I push it to the limit. A casual user would most likely not have any problems and Mavericks would run smoothly.

Im quite a heavy user, i work in graphic prepress so im quite aware of issues that can arise on complex configurations. I also use Google drive, have a few shared drives and im connected to a fairly complex LAN for a home network. I admit i only have three email accounts setup in mail but it runs perfectly. I do alot of work in the adobe suite as that is my profession. I bootcamp into Windows 7 on both machines and I have over 6 TB's of files on my NAS and finder shows the directory contents almost instantly every time.

Im sorry but perhaps you should try a fresh re-install, if that does not work move back to ML and wait for 10.9.4>. Btw if there is serious issues with an OS you are going to see it on a basic install, being a "power user" does not make issues suddenly arise apart from compatibility issues.