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MacBook became very slow after Lion

yoak

yoak

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Oct 4, 2004
1,690
213
Oslo, Norway
I installed Lion on my wifes MacBook and it became very unresponsive. It hangs, beach balling all the time etc.
It's a 2010 MacBook.
I installed Lion from a burnt file that I downloaded on my MacBook pro.
She is not very happy about it so any help would be appreciated.
 
If you have a backup (or can make a backup) of all her files I would suggest a complete erase and reinstall. I have seen multiple posts where this fixes the problems you are experiencing.
 
How much RAM does it have? Clean or upgrade install? My iMac was fairly slow with Lion DP as I did an upgrade install but ever since I did a clean install when the retail version was released, my iMac has been as fast as on day one.
 
2gb ram. I could do clean install, but I rather not. How would it be to restore the files from a SL TM backup?
 
You are really pushing it with only 2GB of RAM. I suggest that you upgrade to the maximum amount that your computer can hold.
 
Repair Disk Permissions

I had the same problem but now thanks to this old tip when I first upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, here's what I did.

Go to Applications, Utilities, Disk Utility and choose your hard drive by high lighting it. Click on Repair Disk Permissions button and let it run. It will take a few minutes. When finished, simply reboot your Mac and it will be fast once again.
 
My MBP 13" boots in 17 seconds after I installed Lion. I have no bugs and all is working great. What you need to do is you've got to learn all the nuts and bolts of how to run a Mac. This takes time and lots of experience. I would recommend that you get some books and start reading all you can get on Mac. People think because they paid $3000 for a Mac, the machine should run on itself. That's funny, how the general public has this attitude. Instead of studying hard and for long hours some dudes want to just "click" here and there and complain that Apple don't do his job. Get some books man---------,
RF,
 
To RoyalFlushAK(s):

I completely disagree. Apple are promoting their line as "turn-on and they run" PCs. And they do! You should not have sit down and read book to use a Mac, and you certainly should not have to tweak it for it to work.

Of course even Apple mess up, and not selling Lion on DVD is one of these times.


To yoak:

Try a reinstall using a USB stick (or external HD). I know this means you have to go out of your way and create this stick, but there are guides around.

Then migrate from TM.

Good luck. i have it on my MP, my MBPs, and on my MA. It works flawlessly, and have done so since April.


Bo
 
Last edited:
RoyalFlushAK(s), I agree with Killerbob completely.

Macs are so easy to use it's not funny. If you're reading book after book - and not studying for some sort of certification - you're missing the point. Any help I've ever needed I've gotten from a forum like this.

I did what yvrgal did: Applications >> Utilities >> Disk Utility. Then verified and repaired disk permissions. I also ran Verify Disk to make sure things were okay. Now, everything seems to be running more quickly.
 
As you can see from my join date I have some experience running Macs.
I just posted here to see if anyone else had similar issues before I started to problem solve. Weird thing is that I didn't have time to repair permissions ad I wad going to work. 2 restarts later my wife tells me it's running fine. I saw how slow it was do it was a bit if surprise.
I'm just happy that I didn't have to do a clean install on her Mac after I used it to test out Lion, I'm still on SL
 
I've also read that it takes a few restarts to "calm" things down. The re-indexing is murder, but once it's done, the frustration - at least seems to - end!

Glad to hear things are running faster for your wife.
 
DogComputing said:
I've also read that it takes a few restarts to "calm" things down. The re-indexing is murder, but once it's done, the frustration - at least seems to - end!

Glad to hear things are running faster for your wife.
Click to expand...

Hi, thanks.
I've always wondered what re-indexing means. Does the machine figure out where everything I'd on the hard drive from scratch or what's going on.
Plea enlighten me
 
Hi,

I'm referring to Spotlight re-indexing the content of your machine. So yes, you can theoretically find everything by clicking COMMAND + spacebar. A box will open in the top right corner. Enter a term, and matches to that term will appear.

That first re-index takes a very long time (hours), depending on the amount of content you have stored on your computer.

You can choose to NOT index certain things...

Go into System Preferences >> Spotlight and a list of what will be indexed will appear. To keep something from being indexed, click on Privacy, then at the bottom of that screen click the + key. You can then choose from your Finder window anything you don't want indexed.

I hope I've helped!

~DogComputing
 
Hi,

Regarding Spotlight, can it be configured to scan and index a NAS system?

KB
 
You know, I'm really not qualified to answer that, Killerbob. But, theoretically, if you can point to its location, Spotlight "should" be able to scan and index it, including external hard drives.
 
I know that on my Mac Pro that runs Leopard spotlight always search through raids, etc that are attached to it..
It's funny what was mentioned about SL not doing it, because when I had me MP in a post house with 3 other MPs that all ran SL I could never get spotlight to scan the external drives on those MPS.
I thought it was just setting that was not turned on. Guess it paid off never to upgrade the OS on my editing system when it was finally working very stable

PS Thanks DogComputing for the info on spotlight
 
yoak said:
2gb ram. I could do clean install, but I rather not. How would it be to restore the files from a SL TM backup?
Click to expand...

Do a clean install. I've seen countless posts about people having problems with their Macs after installing Lion and countless more stating they get great results after they do a clean install. Do the install and you should be fine.
 
This fix the problem

I had the same problem, here's what I did.

Go to Applications, Utilities, Disk Utility and choose your hard drive by high lighting it. Click on Repair Disk Permissions button and let it run. It will take a few minutes. When finished, simply reboot your Mac and it will be fast once again.
 
cezza01 said:
I found that resetting the SMC worked a treat. It’s still running warm but 10 times faster.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964
Click to expand...

Just had to bump this old thread to say this worked for me. I was pretty much at the end of my rope with my 2008 MacBook since its Lion upgrade: borderline unusable, unresponsive menus and windows, beachball for minutes at a time (no exaggeration), and on and on.

I was skeptical, but resetting SMC did it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. :D
 
Repair Disk Permissions

yvrgal said:
I had the same problem but now thanks to this old tip when I first upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, here's what I did.

Go to Applications, Utilities, Disk Utility and choose your hard drive by high lighting it. Click on Repair Disk Permissions button and let it run. It will take a few minutes. When finished, simply reboot your Mac and it will be fast once again.
Click to expand...

Awesome, I tried a lot of things to increase the green in my activity monitor and speed up my Mac after the upgrade to Lion, none of which made any difference until I ran the Repair Disk Permissions in the System Preferences. Just took about 5 to 10 minutes. Deleting and organizing files didn't make any difference.
 
1. go to Disk Utility
2. click on "Repair Disk Permissions" and wait until the end.
3. go to System Performance
4. click startup disk
5. select the usual boot Hard Disk of your mac and Restart.

this worked for me! :D
 
yvrgal said:
I had the same problem but now thanks to this old tip when I first upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, here's what I did.

Go to Applications, Utilities, Disk Utility and choose your hard drive by high lighting it. Click on Repair Disk Permissions button and let it run. It will take a few minutes. When finished, simply reboot your Mac and it will be fast once again.
Click to expand...

Will this erase any stuff on the mac? Like documents, pictures and stuff?
Thx <3
 
yvrgal said:
I had the same problem but now thanks to this old tip when I first upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, here's what I did.

Go to Applications, Utilities, Disk Utility and choose your hard drive by high lighting it. Click on Repair Disk Permissions button and let it run. It will take a few minutes. When finished, simply reboot your Mac and it will be fast once again.
Click to expand...


This worked for me. It took about a hour for me just to get to the point of doing this because of the extreme lag from Lion but after the repair it worked like it did from day one with my Mac. Thanks a bunch yvrgal!!!!
 
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