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Why am I seeing so much of the beach ball

F

fjs08

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 25, 2003
1,252
0
I have an almost 5 yr old Mac Book Pro.
Since I installed Lion, I'm seeing a lot of the beach ball.
So much that I either leave my Mac and pick up my iPad or use my wife's Sony PC.
Is my Mac to long in the tooth to run Lion or what.
Never had this issue before.
Ido love the iPad though <g >.
Thx.
Frank
 
Frank, me too...though my iMac is only a little over 2 years old. Lion, I don't think is too friendly with Core 2 Duo. Try rebooting and holding down the 3 and 2 keys to boot into 32-bit mode and see if that helps. You may, like me, have a problem with the MDS (spotlight) process being a runaway.

There is a post here in the forums to completely disable it:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1110672/

I'm going on faith that it works the same in Lion. Actually I modded that procedure and just created a new directory called mds-stuff and copied the mds files there instead of removing them. Then I went to the activity monitor, clicked on MDS and did a "Force Quit". I gained back a ton of memory and the CPU response is much improved. Maybe worth a try. I never liked MDS especially since it has issues with Time Machine.
 
Last edited:
kkathman said:
Frank, me too...though my iMac is only a little over 2 years old. Lion, I don't think is too friendly with Core 2 Duo. Try rebooting and holding down the 3 and 2 keys to boot into 32-bit mode and see if that helps. You may, like me, have a problem with the MDS (spotlight) process being a runaway.

There is a post here in the forums to completely disable it:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1110672/

I'm going on faith that it works the same in Lion. Actually I modded that procedure and just created a new directory called mds-stuff and copied the mds files there instead of removing them. Then I went to the activity monitor, clicked on MDS and did a "Force Quit". I gained back a ton of memory and the CPU response is much improved. Maybe worth a try. I never liked MDS especially since it has issues with Time Machine.
Click to expand...

I too agree that Lion isn't Core 2 Duo friendly, i have a April 2008 iMac 2.66Ghz.
 
MacRum2011 said:
I too agree that Lion isn't Core 2 Duo friendly, i have a April 2008 iMac 2.66Ghz.
Click to expand...

Have to disagree. It seems people are having fewer problems with Lion running on older hardware.

My specs:

Early 2008 MacBook Pro, 15-inch, 2.4GHz
6 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 256 MB
Driving a 24-inch Sammy display and a bunch of external drives, from 1TB to 2TB.

Runs like a champ.
 
Just for an additional data point, Lion's running well on an Early 2009 17" 2.66GHz 8GB RAM.

After install, there were the normal set of processes running for a while, so a bit of performance hit then. But, mostly fine, now (some oddities here and there which I'm sure will be adressed in some update).
 
Yeah, runs snappier on my MBP Core 2 Duo than SL. Dramatic slow-downs are probably indicative of an issue, if you will, which is small comfort if you can't rid yourself of the problem.

Aside from Spotlight, anything else churning away?

Rob
 
"Lion isn't Core 2 Duo friendly".

Listen to the CPU chipset experts here, eh?

My iMac with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo runs perfectly, zero beach balls, 4GB of RAM.

If you see the Beach Ball often, the issue is often RAM, not the CPU.
 
Since installing Lion I find I see the Beach ball more often. I think it's mostly due to the Resume feature when you shutdown your computer. I have a 2010 MBP core 2 duo 4gb of RAM
 
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