Macbook Pro very slow under Lion

[augu2000]

Hi,

I have an early 2008 MBP (MacBookPro4,1 model) with 2.4 core 2 duo processor and 4GB of RAM. I upgraded to Lion when it came out, about a year ago, and my computer has been very slow ever since. It takes forever to boot, and then it does not run smoothly as it used to do with Snow Leopard. Programs lag to launch and things are slow in general.

Is there anything I can do, short of going back to SL, to improve performance? When I upgraded I did not do a clean install. Does that make a difference?

Thanks!

 

[RSL]

Lion is slow to boot unless you have an SSD. It uses a large cache on the hard drive, which means that it's constantly writing stuff. That makes it slow on a spinning drive. IMO an SSD is needed for a smooth user experience.

I used Lion on the very same machine as yours. I had an SSD/HDD combo and the boot time was fast, but since my user folder was on the HDD the constant caching made it sometimes painful (beachballs). I eventually downgraded the machine to SL, and been happy ever since.

 

[Edie Brickell]

Your computer may be slow due to so many reason not only because you have upgraded to lion. There are reasons of slow Mac like unwanted applications installed, duplicate files, startup programs, universal binary files, cache files. You can try any cleanup utility which can remove these unwanted files before going back to SL. Try Stellar Speedup Mac, Clean my Mac, easyduplicatefinder, or any other good cleaning software to improve your Mac Speed.

 

[GGJstudios]

Is there anything I can do, short of going back to SL, to improve performance? When I upgraded I did not do a clean install. Does that make a difference?

If you're having performance issues, this may help:

Performance Tips For Mac OS X​

A clean install may also help.

Your computer may be slow due to so many reason not only because you have upgraded to lion. There are reasons of slow Mac like unwanted applications installed, duplicate files, startup programs, universal binary files, cache files. You can try any cleanup utility which can remove these unwanted files before going back to SL. Try Stellar Speedup Mac, Clean my Mac, easyduplicatefinder, or any other good cleaning software to improve your Mac Speed.

I like your music, but 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 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, with the risk of deleting something important in the process.

These apps 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. In fact, deleting some caches can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt.

Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.

Five Mac maintenance myths​