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MBP: Slowness!?

JasonR

JasonR

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 11, 2008
958
2
I have a July 2008 Macbook Pro, 2.5 GHz, 7200 RPM drive, 4 GB of ram. My Macbook Pro slows way down when I'm only running Adobe Photoshop CS3, transmission, VLC, adium, firefox, and Parallels Windows XP. I wasn't doing anything in Windows XP at this time. I have 1.5 GB allocated to the Virtual Machine and the other 2.5 for OS X (although Parallels somehow sees 8 GB ram?).

Is this normal? Seems like my other PCs were faster, but I hate the windows environment. I only have Windows for Quickbooks Pro. Should I upgrade to a new machine, or should my machine not be slowing down? By slow I mean I get the beachball constantly, and everything is jerky. I HATE working on slow computers.

Suggestions? I did a clean install about 2 weeks ago....
 
What tasks are you doing? If you have a 1080p video playing in VLC, and a large photoshop project going, and 20 firefox tabs open, alongside XP in a VMthen yes, I can see that slowing your computer right down as it'll be using all your RAM.

Even if you aren't doing anything in windows, it will be using the RAM, as parallels will have reseved it, and the mac wont be able to use it for anything else. If you aren't using quickbooks all the time, shut off parallels.
 
Like I said I didn't have anything in Photoshop open at the time. I have a 5 hour radio show open in VLC, no video...
 
If you are only using windows for quickbooks, I'd consider lowering the RAM the XP VM gets to 512Mb, the quickbooks sys requirements are
System Requirements Details: Microsoft Windows XP - 1.8 GHz - RAM 256 MB - HD 1 GB
 
You have all that crap running and your surprised that its kinda slow? really? i mean come on, your running parallels along with all that stuff what do you expect?
 
JasonR said:
I'm only running Adobe Photoshop CS3, transmission, VLC, adium, firefox, and Parallels Windows XP
Click to expand...

Ha like mustang said that is a lot of applications. just because you arent doing anything within the programs doesnt mean that they aren't taking up RAM. You are essentially running 2 operating systems, a highly advanced image editing app, and 4 medium RAM usage apps and you are wondering why it's slowing down.
 
I ran the same apps 1 Month ago and hardly any slowdown.

Today my MBP locked up, I was only running firefox and transmission. Computer wouldn't respond, beachball everywhere. I restarted and had slowdown upon start up (after giving it a few minutes to load up). Now I'm only running firefox and it's still somewhat slow. WTF is the deal!?
 
If you can, I'd take your computer to the Applestore and ask a genius there what you might be able to do to improve the speed. There's nothing like a hands on examination by an expert. All we can really do is speculate here(though there may be many good ideas)

I definitely don't think its time to upgrade a notebook that's slightly less than a year old!
 
JasonR said:
I ran the same apps 1 Month ago and hardly any slowdown.

Today my MBP locked up, I was only running firefox and transmission. Computer wouldn't respond, beachball everywhere. I restarted and had slowdown upon start up (after giving it a few minutes to load up). Now I'm only running firefox and it's still somewhat slow. WTF is the deal!?
Click to expand...

ok try 2 things before you take it to the Apple store.

reset PRAM and the SMC.
 
UPDATE: My MBP is even SLOWER. I can't even type a web address without it being slow. In other words. I start typing "macrumors.com" and I can type out before it displays on the address bar. I get the beach ball everywhere. I'm running Firefox, Adium (just turned it on) and Activity Monitor. I have 4 GB of Ram and Activity Monitor says I have 3 GB free.

I need to get some work done, and I absolutely can't on this system. WTF!!!? I don't have another Mac or PC to work on at the moment.
 
JasonR said:
UPDATE: My MBP is even SLOWER. I can't even type a web address without it being slow. In other words. I start typing "macrumors.com" and I can type out before it displays on the address bar. I get the beach ball everywhere. I'm running Firefox, Adium (just turned it on) and Activity Monitor. I have 4 GB of Ram and Activity Monitor says I have 3 GB free.

I need to get some work done, and I absolutely can't on this system. WTF!!!? I don't have another Mac or PC to work on at the moment.
Click to expand...

Can you post e picture of your activity monitor for us to see? It will be interessesing to see what is hogging your CPU and RAM.
 
JasonR said:
UPDATE: My MBP is even SLOWER. I can't even type a web address without it being slow. In other words. I start typing "macrumors.com" and I can type out before it displays on the address bar. I get the beach ball everywhere. I'm running Firefox, Adium (just turned it on) and Activity Monitor. I have 4 GB of Ram and Activity Monitor says I have 3 GB free.

I need to get some work done, and I absolutely can't on this system. WTF!!!? I don't have another Mac or PC to work on at the moment.
Click to expand...

could be your hardrive. and also check the processor usage.
 
I have a 200 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive with over 90 GB available. Here are screen shots of Activity Monitor.
 

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So I can surf quicker on my iphone than my MacBook pro. WTF. About to throw this thing out the window...
 
Are your fans spinning alright? Sounds like the CPU is throttling back a lot because of heat issues.
 
Look at your own activity monitor screenshots. You're using all your RAM and having to revert to the pagefile, which is way slower. Time for 8gb RAM or less system usage. A SSD would also speed things up, but its not going to be cheap.
 
taylorwilsdon said:
Look at your own activity monitor screenshots. You're using all your RAM and having to revert to the pagefile, which is way slower. Time for 8gb RAM or less system usage. A SSD would also speed things up, but its not going to be cheap.
Click to expand...

How am I using all my Ram with only Firefox running????
 
Defnately something odd going on! I'd expect parallels to slow things, but not just firefox. Have you grid creating a new user account, and see if that's just as slow.
I have a 2-3yr old MBP with 3GB of ram, and I don't have speed problems - so your hardware is fine! I agree that you should take it in to a apple store if there is one nearby.
 
I haven't updated to 10.5.7 yet. I have actually formatted my hard drive and reinstalled OS X. Still the same problem. I did take it to the Apple Store and it didn't slow down for them there (it's intermittent). :\
 
Called Apple disport and let them know about the slowdown. The genius said it may be a hard drive issue. Anyways, they're sending me a box so they can conduct the repair, and I also notified them of the 8600M GT display issues.

My applecare runs out in 49 days. I plan on selling this machine because it seems to be a ticking timebomb. Should I buy the additional applecare for $249, or should I save the money and just sell the machine?
 
The last two builds of transmission have a huge impact on speed after a while.
Latest flash on mac is also slowing things down. Could be the reason why Firefow is at the top.
Also this sounds like a memory leak in some app you are running. Maybe one of the two mentioned above.
 
The problem still exists even when transmission is off. I've even tried Safari instead of firefox.
 
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