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Leopard slow on a brand new Macbook

marcinito

marcinito

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 29, 2008
28
0
Hi all,

Here's what happened. I had bought a Macbook about 9 months ago. Unfortunately, last week I spilled white wine on it and it died. I am in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the machine was bought in Poland. Either way I took it to authorized service and the guy told me that Logic was shot. Replacing it, according to him, didn't have much sense, because it's very expensive and still I couldn't have any guarantees that something else wouldn't come up later, after the fix.

So I decided to buy a new one.

The only difference is that it's running Leopard, as opposed to Tiger on the previous machine. I told the technicians to move all my data from the old macbook to the new one (it was bought at the same place), and so they did.

When I arrived home with the new computer, I noticed that the systems performance is slower:

- The genie effect is glitchy
- The dock appears in a glitchy way
- switching between the window is slower and glitchy
- there is a visible delay between clicking an icon and taking action, be it opening windows, or opening apps.
- Safari, stops to respond virtually every time I try to close it.
- Some other applications also crash, but not as often as Safari.

I browsed through this forum and found out that, at least for a vast majority of people, the swith from Tiger to Leopard was of great benefit and the system actually respond quicker and smoother. And this is not even in the case of a brand new machine!

I disabled the 3D dock and played around with some settings of Spotlight. It's still the same.

I am not that much into macs, as I have been using them for only 9 months, but still something seems not all right. If I wanted to have an unresponsive computer I would have bought a PC, right?

The amount of data moved between the computers was of roughly 70 Gigs. Is it possible that such a transfer might have choked it a bit? It still has 10 gigs of free space...

Any ideas, guys?:confused:
 
After that big of a transfer, the first thing I'd try is repairing permissions. Was the old hard drive bigger? If the old hard drive was bigger than the new one, that would explain it. All I can think of is first repair permissions. If that doesn't work, you might try an Archive & Install? That would preserve your data and see if the original OS install was just glitchy.

If that doesn't work, try verifying the disk for errors with Disk Utility. May be you just got unlucky and it's a machine with bad hardware.

After those ideas.... umm can you take it in and show them?
 
thanks for the reply!

can you guide me a bit how to perform these steps? As I said, I am not that good with sticking my fingers into the system...

cheers
 
To repair permissions, go into your Applications folder and then the Utilities folder. Click on the 'Disk Utility' icon, and select your hard drive from the list on the left.

There are some First Aid options, Verify/Repair Disk Permissions and Verify Disk (you can't repair it whilst the disk is in use).

So all you need to do is click 'Repair Disk Permissions' and wait. :) You could also click 'Verify Disk' to check that there's nothing wrong with it.

To do an Archive and Install, you need to boot up with the Leopard CD it came with. Whilst following the steps, there will be an option to do this. It will make a fresh install of Leopard and you can then manually copy your files over from the archive folder.

Hope this helps!
 
I am doing the "Repair Permissions" but I am a bit worried that it's saying "less than 1 minute" and the progresion bar seems to have stopped...

How long should it take?

thanks for all the tips, guys!
 
ok, it actually finished.

this is what it says:

ACL found but not expected on "Library/Application Support/Apple/iChat Iconds/Flowers.jpg

...and a couple of other items in this directory.

At the end it said that the permission replair is complete.

What do you think?
 
That doesn't sound too bad. Have you noticed any difference? If not, you should try the other steps too. :)
 
Are you running Leopard version 10.5.2 (the latest)? I had many of the same problems on my G4 PB when I upgraded from silky smooth Tiger, but they were all fixed in 10.5.2 update. Just a thought.
 
10gb free is no way near enough.

You should generally keep about 20% free (as with all OSes).

See if you can clear any of your old stuff out... or see about getting a bigger HDD or an external HDD to archive things onto...
 
Questions

1. First make sure to update to 10.5.2.
2. Make sure you have at least 15% of your hard drive space available. (If not, you need to either upgrade the hard drive or trash some files to make room.)
1. My next question would be whether the computer is very hot, with fans blowing loudly. That would mean that some rogue application is eating away at the processor cycles. If so, launch Activity Monitor to find out the culprit.
2. If the computer is not excessively hot, then I would probably create a new user and log in as that user to see if that solves the problem. If so, log back into your user account, make a backup of your preferences (hard drive/users/your user name/Library/preferences), trash the preferences and restart. That should solve the problem.
3. If none of those items work, there is probably a misbehaving application that is running some backup process that is slowing things down. Try looking at your startup items folder for a start.
 
I'm still noticing choppy performance when setting the dock to maximize at full and also minimizing and clicking apps in the dock using genie effect.
 
ok,

- the computer is not excessively hot. the fans are all right.
- on a 80 GB drive I have +11 GB of space free, but I never had such problems with the previous machine.
- Activity Monitor shows nothing unusual: iTunes, Skype, torrent app (which is crashing a lot today), Safari

I will now try to create another account to see what happens. BRB!
 
i noticed one strange (at least to me) thing:

System Preferences - Accounts - Login Items:

I have a couple of items that I don't know, like System Events and Magic Menu.

Should they be there?
 
aross99 said:
How much memory do you have? Leopard needs more ram than Tiger. I would make sure you have at least 1G with Leopard...
Click to expand...

it's a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB or RAM and 80 GB of hard disk.
OS: 10.5.2
 
i logged in with a guest account and compared the performance. the 3D dock is much less smooth than the 2D one, even on the guest account. I didn't notice any change with opening programs neither.
 
after opening console I found hundreds of messages like this, more keep coming up. This is related to my torrent program.

08-02-29 20:27:04 Bits on Wheels[668] *** -[NSCFDictionary objectsForKeys:notFoundMarker:]: marker is nil - this will be an exception in applications linked on Leopard.

Could it be a problem?
Perhaps this app is not really kosher while running on Leopard?
 
Ah! That could likely be the problem. Lots of torrent programs tend not to work that well with OS X. Try uninstalling that (assuming you don't have some big investment in it or anything) and using something like Transmission or Azureus instead and see if that helps any.

Edit: I just checked Bits on Wheels' homepage. The current version is from 2005. That sounds like the culprit to me.
 
I'll do that.

But I also ran the "verify disk" and it found some errors, said it should be repaired, but I can't run the "repair disk" as this option is not available. There is a note saying that I can run it from the leopard CD, but I haven't found any disk utilities there. How to find it?
 
You can run Disk Utility by booting the DVD, proceeding towards install, but when the menubar appears, run Disk Utility from the menubar.
 
KingYaba said:
Download MainMenu and run it.
Click to expand...

I downloaded the program a started indexing the spotlight again. Something is wrong - the estimated time is increasing, it's like 130 hours already. There is no option to stop it. The fan is woring on full power and the machine is pretty hot. Should I be worried? What do I do?
 
I would do an archive and install of OS X, or even better yet, backup your data to an external hard drive and do a clean install, then restore your data.
 
@ crazyeddie: I don't want to do that just yet, although it may be the best option. I want to tweek the system for better performance first.

@ kingyaba: what tasks do you recommend to run with the MainMenu? I indexed the spotlight again (it finished), cleaned system cache and all users' caches.
 
Hmm.. I don't know if you remember the issue. I actually gave up for a while..
I only wrote an email to the store / service where I bought my MB and described them the problem I was experiencing. Their reply was nothing different from all the tips you guys had given me - first they told me that Leo may actually be a bit 'choppy' with 1GB of RAM, can anyone confirm this? It does make sense to me, to some extent, but as far as I recall the min. req for Leo is 512MB of RAM - I would think that on 1GB it should run all sweet. They also suggested to create a new account and so on...

Anyhow, today I did an archive&install, but I was a bit scared since I didn't have a disk that I would use to make a copy of my hard drive. The installation went smooth, but the problems persist. It's not anything that serious - it's just worrying that things don't work as smooth as on my previous MB with Tiger. I hope that Apple will come up with some solution to this, otherwise I am left with no other option but to buy + 1GB of RAM.

I have a question though:

after the install I have a folder with the previous system. What does it contain and what should I do with it? before the install I actually removed all the non-apple apps, so I don't need to restore any of them. Can I just delete it or should I overwrite some of the folders on top of the corresponding ones in the new system?

Cheers!
 
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