Tell me if my MBP should be able to handle these tasks

[Steve Jobs.]

I have a June 2009 Macbook Pro 2.53ghz (9400m gfx card)

I am running these programs at once and am experiencing extreme lag in the overall system:

1) Heroes of Newerth
2) Itunes (with music playing)
3) Safari


I feel like my $2k computer should be able to take these tasks on with no problems but i get systemwide lag, even my text cursor is lagging while im typing this.

Is it just an incapable computer or am i doing something wrong?

 

[miles01110]

Close each program and see what solves the problem. I bet that running the game is the problem, and since the game is probably quite intensive it's not out of the ordinary.

 

[altecXP]

That sounds to me like a dying hard drive.

 

[Steve Jobs.]

Yeah its the game, maybe i shouldn't run everything on high settings haha


either way its not like im running Crysis.

Its just an RTS game



EDIT: its a 5400rpm harddrive with 90gigs left on it

 

[falterego]

Something is wrong with your system. I'm able to run World of Warcraft on max display settings, iTunes, Google Chrome, iChat and still not have lag anywhere in the system. Granted I only get about 25 fps in the game, but it doesn't lag. I'm running a MBP 13" with the 2.66 cpu. Looks like the only difference is the video chipset. I'm not too familiar with the new 320m, so I can't compare the two, but that shouldn't make that significant of a difference.

 

[jclardy]

Something is wrong with your system. I'm able to run World of Warcraft on max display settings, iTunes, Google Chrome, iChat and still not have lag anywhere in the system. Granted I only get about 25 fps in the game, but it doesn't lag. I'm running a MBP 13" with the 2.66 cpu. Looks like the only difference is the video chipset. I'm not too familiar with the new 320m, so I can't compare the two, but that shouldn't make that significant of a difference.

It could be the game itself...some games will attempt to consume every cpu cycle they can get their hands on, even if it is not an intensive game. It just may be a poorly coded one. WoW is a multi-million dollar budget title while Heroes of Newerth is probably nowhere near that.

 

[lewis82]

That sounds to me like a dying hard drive.

Most likely it isn't. Extreme lags when opening apps can be caused by a bad drive, but once everything is running (I.E. in the ram), it can't be a cause.

 

[jclardy]

Most likely it isn't. Extreme lags when opening apps can be caused by a bad drive, but once everything is running (I.E. in the ram), it can't be a cause.

Oh, just had another thought, it could be that you are running out of RAM so the OS starts paging and moving things from RAM on and off the hard disk. You could probably tell by looking at the amount of free ram in Activity Monitor while you have everything open.

 

[lewis82]

Oh, just had another thought, it could be that you are running out of RAM so the OS starts paging and moving things from RAM on and off the hard disk. You could probably tell by looking at the amount of free ram in Activity Monitor while you have everything open.

He has the same computer as me, so has 4 gigs of ram.

He could be running out of ram, but I never did while I was running COD4 at full resolution with Blackfire and TeamSpeak3 opened.

Could be true, though.

EDIT: I think it's a GPU issue. Core graphics are all made by the GPU. He's running a game, the 9400 has a lot of pressure.

 

[falterego]

It could be the game itself...some games will attempt to consume every cpu cycle they can get their hands on, even if it is not an intensive game. It just may be a poorly coded one. WoW is a multi-million dollar budget title while Heroes of Newerth is probably nowhere near that.

Good point. I didn't think about the demands of the game. I just figured it looked a LOT like the screen shots from WoW. Maybe there's a patch for the game that needs to be installed. I know when Blizzard was working on their patch they kept telling me to get updated drivers, and check my c:\windows\temp folder for any files that were being accessed during game play. Seems most companies don't accept the fact that there are Mac users that want to play their games, so they don't put a lot of effort into their Mac dev team.

 

[Xombie11]

You're really not meant to be able to multitask with (modern) games and other applications. Try using Safari while playing Starcraft 2 and you'll see what I mean.

WoW is more casual and far less CPU-intensive.