Problem(s) with my Snow Leopard Macbook Pro

[m3tolli]

Hi guys and gals, this is my first post and unfortunately its not a happy one, so please bear with me as i am going to try and explain every step i have taken so that if it is a mistake of my own making that has caused the problems, you guys can tell me

I recently purchased a 15"4 MacBook Pro (2.2GHz Quad-core, 4GB 1333Hz DDR3 RAM, 750Gb HD, 1Gb discreet graphics card), its was heavily discounted as it was the Jan 2011 model (8,2 i think), that didn't deter me as i was already accustomed to snow leopard on my old mac, and the specs of the computer are perfect for what i needed.

So there i was all giddy and happy to get the computer running, i get to the install and it asks if i want to migrate from time machine, i saw this as a no brainer (at the time) as i needed my old files eventually so why not do it straight off? so this goes on for a while i finish off the installation and OMG SO SLOWWWW. i literally couldn't get anything done. My old 2007 macbook (the white one) was running faster than it.

So i looked around and found that migration from time machine imports all the old crappy system files which cause the mac to slow down. TIME TO CLEAN REINSTALL!

I reinstall a fresh copy of Snow Leopard, wiping all data previously on the HD, and once all was installed it seemed ok, i didn't pay massive amounts of attention the speed it was running at, i was just happy to be running a mac that didn't take 2 mins to load finder.

So then i start to bring all of my documents over from the old mac, no programs, just all of my old folders, pictures, movies etc. and it seemed to be working fine. So i bring over the dmg files for programs i would be using (MS OFFICE 2011, Illustrator + PS CS5, VLC media player, AutoCAD 2012, Skype, sketchup, and utorrent) and soon problems started to arise AGAIN.. so now i'm starting to get a bit annoyed, finder is slow (but manageable), safari bugs every now and again, skype REALLY slows the computer down, and MS Office 2011 is difficult at times.

I havn't done anything out of the ordinary (to my knowledge), anything i have done i had already done on my old mac with success i really cant see where the problem lies... please help

many thanks, m3tolli

 

[smirk]

It sounds to me like you did everything correctly. It doesn't make sense that your computer would slow down merely by installing software. Have you checked the disk for filesystem errors? When things are slow, does Activity Monitor show any culprits (processes gulping all available memory, maxing out the CPU)? And you're not out of disk space, are you?

 

[m3tolli]

nothing out of ordinary on activity monitor, 660Gb out of 750 free.. cant see the problem tbh... i think it might be a faulty HD? or is this a ridiculous presumption?

and thank you for taking the time to read my post and replying sensibly

 

[smirk]

Any messages of interest in Console.app? Did a disk verify in Disk Utility come up clean? Otherwise, I really don't know. It could be a faulty drive, it just seems unlikely since it sounds like things were fine when just the OS was installed. I wonder if you have a bad memory stick? Download memtest, burn it onto a CD or bootable USB stick, and let it run overnight. Maybe something will turn up.

Good luck, keep us posted.

 

[Macman45]

Bad Ram would be my guess..I'd take it back, it also might be worth considering upgrading to 8GB, but not from Apple....Crucial or Newegg....Much cheaper.