Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Is my new quad i7 too slow?

The OP's issues sound like mine, except my i7 Quad is an early 2011. Mine I suspect are caused by lack of RAM, the 1TB Samsung 5200 rpm I have the OS on, too many programs installed and opened, way too many browser tabs open and just general user error.

I'll be getting an SSD and 16GB of RAM when I can afford it.
 
Furifo said:
As others have said, you problems lie with your HDD. A 5400rpm is a huge bottleneck to virtually any system nowadays.
Click to expand...

Wrong.

My very old desktop is an Athlon 2.8 with 4GB RAM and 5400rpm HDD running Ubuntu and it's faster then my MBP 17" 2.4GHz 8GB RAM Late 2011 ...

I'm very disappointed with my first Macbook. I think the problem is Lion.
 
cariocap said:
Wrong.

My very old desktop is an Athlon 2.8 with 4GB RAM and 5400rpm HDD running Ubuntu and it's faster then my MBP 17" 2.4GHz 8GB RAM Late 2011 ...

I'm very disappointed with my first Macbook. I think the problem is Lion.
Click to expand...

This is what I'm saying. Think I've read about lion being the memory hog somewhere compared to snow leopard? At this point it's nothing I can't live without, I'm sure 16gb could be found for 100 bucks sometime in the next few months I'll just upgrade then, ssd will come next week.
 
theromanone said:
This is what I'm saying. Think I've read about lion being the memory hog somewhere compared to snow leopard? At this point it's nothing I can't live without, I'm sure 16gb could be found for 100 bucks sometime in the next few months I'll just upgrade then, ssd will come next week.
Click to expand...

Upgrading to 16GB won't solve your problem.
I think we need to wait until Lion gets mature status.
 
...but you can't blame it on Lion either...I have a new late 2011 13" 750GB HDD 8GB ram and I am not seeing these issues...
 
cariocap said:
Wrong.

My very old desktop is an Athlon 2.8 with 4GB RAM and 5400rpm HDD running Ubuntu and it's faster then my MBP 17" 2.4GHz 8GB RAM Late 2011 ...

I'm very disappointed with my first Macbook. I think the problem is Lion.
Click to expand...

Ok, simple solution: Install ubuntu on your macbook.

I'm not having any issues with Lion, but I have a SSD.
 
Macman45 said:
Nope. Normal, your issue is the 4 GB of RAM....even with 8GB my 17" pro takes a few seconds to load Office....Your speed would be increased if you sell the two 2GB sticks and replace them with two 8 GB modules.

On the whole, I'd say you were in good shape....Office for mac really isn't great at all. I bought it because I had to, and I'm not buying it again!
Click to expand...

Windows 7 is just much faster. I have tested this many times. It's not a RAM issue. You can fix this with a SSD.
 
mark28 said:
Windows 7 is just much faster. I have tested this many times. It's not a RAM issue. You can fix this with a SSD.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it seems that MS has built in some mechanisms to speed up application launch times on often used applications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher

In OSX this is not really necessary... there is no reason to quit applications since you can just close the documents, as long as the macbook is not turned off. Of course one needs enough ram, which can be an issue with Lion and 4 GB.
 
As I said before, where I thought a restart fixed everything. Nope.

Hate to beat a dead horse, but simply put, does anyone else have a new quad i7 with 4GB ram and 5400HDD and see these even right AFTER restarting?:
1) 4 seconds to open system preferences for the first time, or if not opened in the past hour
2) 6-7 seconds to open powerpoint for the first time, 2-3 seconds more for the "preview templates" to load.
3) pinch-to-zoom slowdown when watching youtube in Safari while reading a pdf on Preview. Only other programs open are iTunes and Finder, both idle.
4) 4 seconds to close out of Word when having only one document open. A two page class Syllabus. Nothing crazy here.

I guess I'm just surprised and annoyed after hearing for years how much quicker and 'optimized OSX is supposed to be.
 
Last edited:
theromanone said:
As I said before, where I thought a restart fixed everything. Nope.

Hate to beat a dead horse, but simply put, does anyone else have a new quad i7 with 4GB ram and 5400HDD and see these even right AFTER restarting?:
1) 4 seconds to open system preferences for the first time, or if not opened in the past hour
2) 6-7 seconds to open powerpoint for the first time, 2-3 seconds more for the "preview templates" to load.
3) pinch-to-zoom slowdown when watching youtube in Safari while reading a pdf on Preview. Only other programs open are iTunes and Finder, both idle.

I guess I'm just surprised and annoyed after hearing for years how much quicker and 'optimized OSX is supposed to be.
Click to expand...

#1 and #2 happens on any Mac. If you want faster launch speed, get an SSD. 5400rpm with only 8MB cache can only do so much. On a side note, opening Control Panel and launching PowerPoint under Bootcamp on Windows 7 64-bit also takes the same count. Not sure about Ubuntu, but I would assume that you wouldn't be able to do an Apple-to-Apple comparison since Office isn't on Ubuntu natively. If you think 7 seconds is brutal, try opening a 500MB Photoshop file...

#3 can happen normally with certain PDFs that are image-heavy or vector-heavy or both. Getting more RAM should solve it, but YMMV.

I think #3 is definitely a legit problem if you are viewing a PDF that only has texts (and nothing else but texts), but #1 and #2 are expected behavior. If you want faster launch speed, there is no way around an SSD. Some of us simply don't mind the slower launch speed because most of us launch an application... only once.
 
I'd love to only launch an application once but then I feel I get the slowdowns more, hence the choppy pinch to zoom in preview with a standard harvard business review pdf (text, a few text-based financial tables, again nothing crazy here).

Really trying to not have to drive the half hour to Apple to compare side by side, but if that's what I have to do I guess that's one option.

I've broken now 3 screwdrivers on these seemingly impossible case screws to install my 8GB ram, yes they were very very dollar-general-cheap. Have a nice solid torx coming in the morning that will be fine, we'll see how things go from there.
 
The screws holding the bottom plates are all at an angle, so if you haven't tried rotating them at the right angle, I think you may want to give that a try.

As for the PDF, don't underestimate the tables. They may be using a lot of crazy vectors. If you can keep on zooming and the tables don't get pixelated, then it's most likely that they are vectors, and a reasonable amount of them will cause some choppiness while zooming. That's normal. Scrolling should be smooth, though.
 
You can also use CleanMyMac or some similar app to tweak various settings and maybe clean up a little (yes, I know your machine is new, but it won't hurt either).

Also, a little offtopic, but it's pretty annoying to not experience amazing performance right out of the box after spending $3000 (me included) and in order to have a speed that is in the "spirit of the time" you have to spend extra couple hundred on Optibay, SSD and RAM. 3000$ is a lot of money these days and you would expect that it would be blazing fast. Now I know it's very reliable, beautiful (in my opinion at least- clean, neat looks) and have good resale value, but still...
 
I got a 5400 RPM Toshiba 750GB with my 2.3 QC 2011 MBP

I immediately extracted it and replaced it with a Vertex III SSD

This Toshiba is probably the nastiest/slowest most disgusting 2.5" SATA drive I've ever seen. Even upgrading to something like a Hitachi 7K500 will give you an AMAZING upgrade in speed
 
theromanone said:
As I said before, where I thought a restart fixed everything. Nope.

Hate to beat a dead horse, but simply put, does anyone else have a new quad i7 with 4GB ram and 5400HDD and see these even right AFTER restarting?:
Click to expand...

I went through this exact same thing when I got my mid 2010 17" MBP. I was also similarly annoyed after spending $2500 on the MBP when my PoS Core 2 laptop running Windows 7 and a load of crappy apps was more pleasant to use than the MBP.

Then I put 8GB RAM and things only got marginally but definitely better. Then I bought a SSD and did a clean 10.7.2 install. Now it works the way a $2500 laptop should (except that it is now a $3200 laptop!).

Windows 7 really does work well on lower powered, RAM and disk constrained hardware - my work machine is testament to that.
 
sublimeguide said:
You can also use CleanMyMac
Click to expand...

I would not recommend CleanMyMac, based on the number of complaints that have been posted in this forum and elsewhere. As an example: CleanMyMac cleaned too much. While you may not have experienced problems yet, enough people have that it's wise to avoid it, especially since there are free alternatives that have better reputations, such as Onyx.

You really don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Most only remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space. It will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software.

For performance concerns, some of this may help: Performance Tips For Mac OS X
 
GGJstudios said:
I would not recommend CleanMyMac, based on the number of complaints that have been posted in this forum and elsewhere. As an example: CleanMyMac cleaned too much. While you may not have experienced problems yet, enough people have that it's wise to avoid it, especially since there are free alternatives that have better reputations, such as Onyx.

You really don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Most only remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space. It will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software.

For performance concerns, some of this may help: Performance Tips For Mac OS X
Click to expand...


Couldn't agree more, leave it alone, a forum search here will reveal all....You really don't need to mess with your Mac as GGJ suggests....leave it alone, and it will do a pretty good job of looking after itself.

I rarely run scripts these days unless I have a specific issue ( FaceTime is one). For this I use Onyx, does the trick, apart form that, my macs do Thier own housekeeping work.
 
As a Pro 13 owner, I think it's awful on Apple's side to supply their supposedly professional machines with 5k RPM hard drives as a standard. It sucks to spend up to 2499$ on a laptop and still have to upgrade it in order to get reasonable performance on basic tasks like iTunes.

Well firstly, ram will always be your best friend. The more the better......BUT.....there's a few things you need to consider. 4GB ram is just fine to run Lion. Don't let people on this forum tell you otherwise. That's ridiculous. Apple currently sells a Macbook Air with 2GB ram and you can't upgrade it. If it was unusable they wouldn't offer it.
If you want to add more ram to your MBP that would be a great idea but 16GB??? No. That's overkill unless you're using it for professional studio editing and you make a living doing so.
Click to expand...

4GB is alright for Lion if you browse the web while listening to music, and little more. My Pro felt slow with 4GB while I was doing nothing special, and I'm experiencing a big improvement now that I upgraded to 8GB and disabled paging via Terminal.
 
Last edited:
Interesting

I have the exact same computer as you do (I got it for Christmas) and I have never had issues like you're describing. My Mac is the fastest computer that I have ever had (granted, I don't play games on mine), but opening and editing word and excel documents don't slow my system down at all. You may want to have it looked at. Just like any other Machine there are bound to be one or two off of the line that don't perform like they should. Good luck!
 
Acejam2k said:
Wrong. RAM doesn't make your computer faster. Increasing memory simply allows you to run more programs at once, and therefore load more temporary data at once.

The OP's issue is 99% due to having a 5400rpm HDD. The difference between 5400 and 7200 rpm is noticeable to me. In addition, since you just got the new machine yesterday, it's possible Spotlight is indexing your entire system. That will certainly slow things down a bit.

There's also a bug in OS X Lion that causes active Time Machine backups to cause a "stutter". The machine will appear frozen for a second or two, and then quickly restore itself. This occurs a few times a minute, but only when Time Machine is actively backing up.
Click to expand...

If you don't have enough RAM, your MBP will use the hard drive to accumulate the amount you are asking for. This is what slows down the computer. Upgrading your RAM simply prevents this from happening as a read/write to/fro RAM is much faster than HDD.
In regards to the HDD, I hardly notice a difference in opening applications between the 5400 and the 7200 RPM drives. I do notice substantial difference when transferring/saving large files. Quite obviously, an SSD speeds things up to a level that is easily noticeable by the human eye and is the way to go if you have the money for it. For my use which involves some processor heavy applications (Maya, SBD, xcode, MudBox, Arena and MiniTAB under Windows, and heavy MatLab), 8GB of ram is just enough for me (usually have 12-20MB free and 50-70MB inactive with 0 Pages-out) and I have no trouble with the 5400RPM HDD.
 
Ive gota brand new i7 Machine and its not slow at all. The only thing I've done to it is put 8GB of ram in it. But even for the cpl weeks I used the original 4GB it was super fast.
 
as for case number 4, this happens when I am playing COD4 Modern Warfare. So I don't know what causes it, but I don't think it's related to RAM or processor per se.

17" early 2011, 2.2 i7, 8 gigs RAM
 
cariocap said:
Wrong.

My very old desktop is an Athlon 2.8 with 4GB RAM and 5400rpm HDD running Ubuntu and it's faster then my MBP 17" 2.4GHz 8GB RAM Late 2011 ...

I'm very disappointed with my first Macbook. I think the problem is Lion.
Click to expand...

Let's run some benchmarks. I can bet you money that this isn't the case.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back