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

Macbook Pro too SLOW

B

Burnsey

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 1, 2007
572
67
Canada
I've had it with my MBP, it is simply too slow. The specs are in my sig, but this baby is/was the top of the line 2.33GHZ Merom version, 2GB ram, 5400rpm drive. When I first got it with Tiger, it would boot in less than 20 seconds, I loved it. Now it boots painfully slowly in Leopard (10.5.7). I timed it at 1:26, which is simply unacceptable. To give you an idea, my brother's recently purchased used 12" powerbook (1.33GHZ G4, ~700mb ram) boots with the same speed, he even beat me once in a boot test.

The boot process looks like this. Once power button is pressed, chime rings and the grey apple logo appears. After a while it gives way to a blue screen which takes a while and then the desktop, which takes forever to load. At this point the computer is reading the disk furiously, and once the desktop appears it is still unusable for 30 seconds or so as the disk is still being read. This was NOT the case under Tiger. I have 33GB of space left on my 120GB HD, I have repaired permissions, run all maintenance tasks etc... to no avail.

So I checked the logs, and here is the log for that 1:26 boot time, I've highlighted some concerns that I hope you guys could help me with:
log.jpg


1: What is "Aladdin USB daemon"? If the process is already running, is there any way to make the system not start it at startup? Here the computer starts the process, realizes it's already running and terminates it. Makes no sense.

2: What are all these "unknown key"?

3: nodename or servname for what? And why does it start the "Aladdin USB daemon" again after it? Didn't it tell me earlier that the process is already running on the system?

4: more unknown keys

5: I got rid of every trace of the crappy POS program that is versioncuecs3, and yet it STILL appears in my boot, how do I make it go away for good?

Please help!
 
Most of this you could find with some Googling..

1) Uninstall any Aladdin products you have installed.
2) blued = bluetooth, cups = printing, ntp = network time
3) Ignore, it's looking for a timeserver that didn't respond.
4) uninstall whatever "Start X" is.
5) CS3 can't call home, ignore. Use Spotlight to search for the leftovers (you have to specify root Library, as it's excluded by default in Spotlight)
 
I have never installed anything from Aladdin, heck I barely even know what it is. Searching my computer reveals nothing on Aladdin. I also have no idea what "Start X" is, nor can I find it anywhere on my computer. Also, are the "unknown" things normal then?
 
Burnsey said:
I have never installed anything from Aladdin, heck I barely even know what it is. Searching my computer reveals nothing on Aladdin. I also have no idea what "Start X" is, nor can I find it anywhere on my computer. Also, are the "unknown" things normal then?
Click to expand...

Aladdin, later Allume, presently Smith Micro, was a company that made the once ubiquitous and always annoying StuffIt software, a compression format and program. Before Apple standardized zip files and DMGs in OS X, most Mac software from the Internets came as .sit files, the StuffIt format.

You may not have installed it yourself, some other software may have, or maybe it came with the system. I agree that you should nuke it.
 
moiety said:
Aladdin, later Allume, presently Smith Micro, was a company that made the once ubiquitous and always annoying StuffIt software, a compression format and program. Before Apple standardized zip files and DMGs in OS X, most Mac software from the Internets came as .sit files, the StuffIt format.

You may not have installed it yourself, some other software may have, or maybe it came with the system. I agree that you should nuke it.
Click to expand...

ahhh Stuffit. I have Stuffit Expander installed for expanding .rar files etc... but it is not supposed to be there on start up, is it? I launch like any other application every time I need it, so why is it there at startup? And what does it have to do with "USB daemon"?
 
Burnsey said:
ahhh Stuffit. I have Stuffit Expander installed for expanding .rar files etc... but it is not supposed to be there on start up, is it? I launch like any other application every time I need it, so why is it there at startup? And what does it have to do with "USB daemon"?
Click to expand...

No idea. Did you start your system with "extensions off", as in the old days? Shut down, then hold down both shift keys as you boot. Is it any faster?
 
moiety said:
No idea. Did you start your system with "extensions off", as in the old days? Shut down, then hold down both shift keys as you boot. Is it any faster?
Click to expand...

Doesnt that make it boot into safe mode? Safe mode is supposed to take longer to boot than normal and I cant see how it would help.
 
From the timestamps, it looks like (1) happened before the shutdown. The line after (3) is the daemon starting up.
 
I recently bought the same machine used, and I love it. I'd suggest putting in 4 gigs of ddr2 ram (yeah, it will only use 3 and change, but you keep dual channel, and it's cheap) and a 7200 rpm hard drive.

Go online and find a site or two about maximizing osx on your machine. Beside the usual stuff like running permissions and scripts, they will show you how to most effectively turn off the processor sucking eye candy that slows your machine up, like widgets, optical effects, etc.
 
I've tried many suggestions given here and elsewhere on the internet. I've gone through and cleaned up my Library, documents folder, pictures folder, desktop, downloads folder, deleted apps I do not use, I've cleaned the user cache, browser caches, I've repaired permissions, I've removed most of my dashboard widgets, I've updated pre-bindings, run daily, monthly and yearly maintenance scripts, I've deleted duplicate fonts, used monolingual to get rid of languages I dont need, and I've booted into safe mode.

My average boot time is around 1:10, my iMac (in sig) which is used as a home computer, has a ton of startup items, runs 10.5.2 and has a nearly full HD boots in 40s. I cant remember the last time I did any of the stuff above on that machine. This is very frustrating.
 
Maybe your drive is super fragmented. Tech Tool Pro and Drive Genius can fix this for you.
 
Those don't look like they have anything to do with your slow booting. The timestamps on them are all wrong for it to be slowing down your system.

As hard drives fill up they just get slower, because free blocks become less and less prevalent. It's just a fact of life.

Your boot speed is also going to be very dependent on your hard drive speed. If the Powerbook 12" and your laptop have the same speed hard drive, it's not surprising they booted at about the same time. Bootup honestly isn't too processor intensive.

Maybe it's time to upgrade the HD?
 
Why do you reboot so frequently? :confused:

Even if you get your reboot time back to 40 seconds, you're still waiting longer the first time you launch any application (because it's not cached in memory).
 
Also a reboot time of 1:20 sounds pretty standard for that modal of Macbook Pro.

My Mac Pro can't even boot in 20 seconds. Maybe close, but that seems a bit fast even for my machine with a 7200 rpm drive.
 
my MBP boots in about 2 mins.. as in fully operational, logged in, itunes open (i have it on log in items) in some respects its actually slower than my mac mini- getting to the login screen for instance.. then after that its faster..

I'd say its quite normal really, i use main menu as opposed to onyx and AppCleaner is a good un.. it gets rid of all the old preferences and .plist files in the library folder that uninstalling an application misses

I'm with other guys suggesting a faster HD. :)


Hope that helps

PTP
 
I'm suspecting it's a fragmented drive. Don't really feel like upgrading the HD though, not yet at least. I guess I'll use an app to defrag it and see if it improves. Of course 1:20 isnt a big deal (more like 2:00 for it to be fully responsive) but I just miss the good old days of 20-30 sec boot times. Also when it does boot, it is still very fast, and definitely puts the powerbook to shame.
 
org.x.start

I suspect this is the X server. For example, typing startx in terminal will launch the X server for the X11 environment (assuming you have X11 installed) for running Unix apps and the like.
 
Ok so I got idefrag and ran an analysis, here is the statistics page, but I'm not sure how to interpret it:
Picture14-3.png


Notice the 99.5% fragmentation for "free space". I have read accounts of people who had really high fragmentation on their "free space" getting a major performance boost upon defragmenting. I know about OSX's ability to defrag on the fly for files under 20mb, but based on the above screenshot do you think I'll notice any performance boosts after defragmenting? I must also add that it's taking a long time to defrag under "quick mode".

OK after letting it run all night, it finished defragmenting. Unfortunately it made no difference:
Picture15-2.png


It didn't improve my free space fragmentation at all. Boot time is still painfully slow, and HD still works really hard. What now?
 
I have read and re-read this thread and I would consider backing everything up and re-installing the OS.
Sometimes no matter what you do you can't find out what is slowing a system down, at that point I would bite the bullet and wipe it.

If you consider how long you have been messing about 'trying' to get this back to that out of the box type speed - then you could have done it - reinstalled all the apps (prob got some space back on the drive by cleaning up some unused stuff as well) and managed to get the MBP working at capacity again.

Just my 2 euros worth:eek:
 
You could try doing a full time machine backup then restoring from it. That is will defragment the disk and should help speed things up if fragmentation is your problem.

How much free disk space do you have? OS X's built in defragmentation doesn't work well once you get below 10-20% free space, and it's possible that idefrag couldn't work either.
 
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