MBP seems to be running sluggishly (2010; 13")

[Furifo]

When I bought my MBP 13 ~14 months ago, it seemed very snappy despite only having a C2D and a 5400rpm drive.

Since upgrading to Lion, I've noticed a drop in battery performance, a much more substantial battery drain while in sleep mode overnight and a much increased startup/shutdown time (especially shut down).

My housemate has the 2011 MPB 13 (i5) and his seems to have no problems at all especially in regards to shutting down (his MBP shuts down in seconds like mine used to in Snow Leopard). His computer also seems to be quite alot snappier than mine (again, like mine used to be in Snow Leopard).

I know his i5 is a much more powerful processor than my C2D but I didn't think that it would make that much of a difference unless there is something else wrong with my mac other than my older generation processor.

What I've done:
- Onyx
- PRAM + SMC
- Checked activity monitor for anything unusual - nothing found

I have:
- 149GB of space available on a 250GB HDD
- 1GB ram available out of 4GB With my usual apps open (safari, iTunes, pages, powerpoint, iCal, mail etc)
- Coconut Battery reveals that my battery is currently at 94% health with 140 loadcycles

Any ideas?

 

[maflynn]

I have a 2010 13 MBP as well and my performance with Lion has not been bad at all, so I would postulate that the differences are as follows.

I use an SSD which is incredibly faster then a 5400rpm HD, so all disk I/O is faster. I have 8 GB of ram and that reduces the need to swap out memory. Don't look at free ram but how is your page outs. Anything written to disk is going to be very slow, especially considering the fact you have a slow drive.

Finally, did you go with a clean install of Lion or an upgrade. I went with the clean install, leaving no vestiges of old apps and SL on my machine.

 

[ssn637]

I have a 2010 13 MBP as well and my performance with Lion has not been bad at all, so I would postulate that the differences are as follows.

I use an SSD which is incredibly faster then a 5400rpm HD, so all disk I/O is faster. I have 8 GB of ram and that reduces the need to swap out memory. Don't look at free ram but how is your page outs. Anything written to disk is going to be very slow, especially considering the fact you have a slow drive.

Finally, did you go with a clean install of Lion or an upgrade. I went with the clean install, leaving no vestiges of old apps and SL on my machine.

I agree with maflynn. I've got the same system but found that an SSD and 8 GB RAM are essential for Lion. Unfortunately, my battery life also suffered by around 40 - 50% even with a clean installation so I've gone back to 10.6.8 in the meantime. Didn't really have any problems worth noting with 10.7.2 otherwise, but I don't have any Rosetta applications and work with Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 and MS Office 2011 (latest versions).

 

[Furifo]

I have a 2010 13 MBP as well and my performance with Lion has not been bad at all, so I would postulate that the differences are as follows.

I use an SSD which is incredibly faster then a 5400rpm HD, so all disk I/O is faster. I have 8 GB of ram and that reduces the need to swap out memory. Don't look at free ram but how is your page outs. Anything written to disk is going to be very slow, especially considering the fact you have a slow drive.

Finally, did you go with a clean install of Lion or an upgrade. I went with the clean install, leaving no vestiges of old apps and SL on my machine.

I am considering purchasing an SSD when prices are slightly easier to the wallet! I cannot remember off the top of my head but in the worse case scenarios, page outs are a few gbs big. Would this be enough of a reason to purchase 8GB ram?

I did an upgrade to Lion. Would you recommend that I do a time machine backup, clean install Lion and restore all my stuff through time machine?

Thanks for your help.

Finally, how fast if your mac with an SSD with regards to launching apps and starting up/ shutting down?

 

[miker2209]

I have the mid '10 13' as well. Mine runs just fine on SL, i upgraded to Lion a few days ago (upgrade not clean install) and the speed is just fine except for the heat and battery issues. With Lion my MBP runs constant at 60c when i browse the web but on SL its a constant 45 - 50c so it is a difference, and my battery lost around an hour of battery time and thats only my browsing forums a news sites. In your case i think u should get the 8gb ram package because with my machine i only use around 1g of RAM memory and the speed runs just fine.

 

[Furifo]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

I think I'm definitely going to upgrade to 8GB of ram in the near future - although I'm going to be sticking to 4gb and keeping an eye on my page outs in the meantime.

Could anybody recommend the highest capacity SSD for £100? A 128gb one would be perfect but those are out of my price range atm.

 

[miker2209]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

I think I'm definitely going to upgrade to 8GB of ram in the near future - although I'm going to be sticking to 4gb and keeping an eye on my page outs in the meantime.

Could anybody recommend the highest capacity SSD for £100? A 128gb one would be perfect but those are out of my price range atm.

Its prolly a good idea but u might have to get an external HDD or remove ur opti for ur HDD cuz i dont think anything below 250gb is near enough.