I bought an i7 15" in April and and noticed its slowed down a little bit. I've put about 250 gigs of pictures on here and ab 50 gigs in music. Should I just format the computer so its like when I got it brand new or would putting the images on an external and deleting them be fine?
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New to Mac and need to make room on my new MBP
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Hm well there should still be over 100GBs left, but I'd recommend an external HDD or a bigger internal as you would likely continue to expand your libraries.
Anyway, try Onyx which does system maintenance, including checking your HDD and see if that speeds up the computer at all
Anyway, try Onyx which does system maintenance, including checking your HDD and see if that speeds up the computer at all
An external hard drive will work well for what you are tying to do. Your username suggest you are into photography. You should always have some sort of back up for your digital pictures. If the only place you have them is on your main drive then if something happened you would be in big trouble
As far as your speed goes, what do you mean by it's "slowed down"? Are we talking boot times, file access, a specific program, etc. etc.? You really shouldn't be seeing much slow down, if any, based on hard drive capacity until you have almost completely filled the drive (less than 10% capacity available). Macs are fairly optimized out of the box and the conventional PC suggestions (defrag your hard drive, etc.) are not solutions. If we are talking about iPhoto being a little slower because you are sorting through 250 GB's of pics then that could be a result of how you are storing them in folders, subdirectories, etc. etc. Everyone has their own workflow and storage preferences. Maybe if you gave us a litte more detail about the specific slow down's you are seeing then we could better help or advise you.
As far as your speed goes, what do you mean by it's "slowed down"? Are we talking boot times, file access, a specific program, etc. etc.? You really shouldn't be seeing much slow down, if any, based on hard drive capacity until you have almost completely filled the drive (less than 10% capacity available). Macs are fairly optimized out of the box and the conventional PC suggestions (defrag your hard drive, etc.) are not solutions. If we are talking about iPhoto being a little slower because you are sorting through 250 GB's of pics then that could be a result of how you are storing them in folders, subdirectories, etc. etc. Everyone has their own workflow and storage preferences. Maybe if you gave us a litte more detail about the specific slow down's you are seeing then we could better help or advise you.
Well its always taken a long time to turn on.. Like I press the power button and about 3 second go by then the screen turns on and about 3-6 sec more to be actually on. So about 10 seconds from the button press to main screen. I do keep backups, but just haven't deleted it off my computer yet
If you're talking about from a cold boot (rather than waking from sleep), that doesn't sound unusual--those apparent delays during boot are the computer doing self-checks and starting to load the OS.
While there are legit reasons to shut down completely (particularly for a desktop, if you're concerned with phantom power draw), for most purposes just closing the lid on the computer so it goes to sleep is sufficient. Open it and you should be ready to go within a couple of seconds.
I sleep and wake my MBP this way easily a dozen times a day, and only reboot once every few weeks for software updates. The OS is designed to run that way.
If I misread and it's taking 10 seconds to wake from sleep, that does sound a little long, but it wouldn't have anything to do with the hard drive being full--that might make it fall asleep slower (since it writes a copy of RAM to the drive, just in case the battery dies), but wake doesn't involve reading or writing anything significant from the hard drive.
While there are legit reasons to shut down completely (particularly for a desktop, if you're concerned with phantom power draw), for most purposes just closing the lid on the computer so it goes to sleep is sufficient. Open it and you should be ready to go within a couple of seconds.
I sleep and wake my MBP this way easily a dozen times a day, and only reboot once every few weeks for software updates. The OS is designed to run that way.
If I misread and it's taking 10 seconds to wake from sleep, that does sound a little long, but it wouldn't have anything to do with the hard drive being full--that might make it fall asleep slower (since it writes a copy of RAM to the drive, just in case the battery dies), but wake doesn't involve reading or writing anything significant from the hard drive.