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Will Mac OS X Lion slow down my computer?

H

h4lp m3

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
I know Lion has a lot of features and in my experience with computers, you sacrifice speed for more features.

My 2ghz MacBook from 2007 is pretty fast with Snow Leopard/3GB and I'd like to keep it that way.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

I have osx lion 10.7 on my iMac 27" 4gb and intel Cor 2 dou with 3.06GHz and 1tb and it has a windows 7 64 bit with 250gb partitioned. It works really well for me overall. One thing I think is slow is the Launchpad when starting up and running Launchpad it takes a while to load. But it eventually loads quickly. I think you will be able to run your laptop really well with lion.
 
If your macbook is anything like my 2007 imac you're likely to chug a little with launchpad. Other than that it's been a pretty similar experience performance wise (aside from a little bugginess).
 
IMHO:
Boottime is a bit slower.
Opening Apps such as Word, Excel is slightly slower (barely noticeble) probably because of the resume function.
Once Apps are running, lion is of similar speed or faster in general, except Safari which seems much faster.
 
tootall said:
IMHO:
Boottime is a bit slower.
Opening Apps such as Word, Excel is slightly slower (barely noticeble) probably because of the resume function.
Once Apps are running, lion is of similar speed or faster in general, except Safari which seems much faster.
Click to expand...

Boottime is probably slower because it is resuming the state that you had when starting back up
 
It's been faster for me and uses less resources.
I have a feeling that it takes a bit longer to start up, but I dont really care about that
 
I found that some applications are slower than others. I would say it comes out to be 8-12% on my MacBook.
 
A bit slow?

I have a Macbook pro 2,4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB RAM (5year old) and things are NOT snappy. After clearing all the caches things seemed to speed up for a while, but now not so much anymore..
I'm hoping a clean install wil fix this. Boot time is the same as snow leopard, but I've been seeing a lot of beach balls.
It's weird, apps seems to load faster for me, but copy/pasting stuff is slower.
Maybe it's my express card driver that needs to be updated.
I thought my laptop would survive one more OS refresh, but at the moment it's been a little frustrating from time to time..
Beach balls occur when all RAM is used, but activity monitor isn't show what is causing the memory hog.
I have to reboot every now and then..
 
Lion is running great on my late 2008 MBP w/ Nvidia 9400M. Did a clean install on another partition and everything feels either the same or faster than Snow Leopard.

One thing I noticed with SL is that it used to lag when opening up stacks or in Cover Flow view in Finder (with lots of blank dotted-line icons that take a couple seconds to be drawn). Lion on the other hand always draws the icons instantaneously. I also haven't noticed any stuttering or lag in Launchpad.
 
Flash is sucking up all my memory and it gets progressively worse. I'm barely functioning and will need to reboot I guess. My hard drive is constantly crunching. IDK what's going on.
 
Currently on my 2010 MBP 13" with 4GB ram it runs a bit sluggishly when trying to play Football Manager and browse a bit. It ran a lot better in SL. Getting 8GB of RAM this week so should see an improvement.
 
beestigbeestje said:
I have a Macbook pro 2,4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB RAM (5year old) and things are NOT snappy. After clearing all the caches things seemed to speed up for a while, but now not so much anymore..
I'm hoping a clean install wil fix this. Boot time is the same as snow leopard, but I've been seeing a lot of beach balls.
It's weird, apps seems to load faster for me, but copy/pasting stuff is slower.
Maybe it's my express card driver that needs to be updated.
I thought my laptop would survive one more OS refresh, but at the moment it's been a little frustrating from time to time..
Beach balls occur when all RAM is used, but activity monitor isn't show what is causing the memory hog.
I have to reboot every now and then..
Click to expand...

I have the same MBP. Before installing Lion I cleaned my mac with cleanmymac. I removed about 5Gb of useless data (of course I check first before deleting) Installed Lion and it's really running smooth. In a way a whole lot better then good old Snow Leopard. I must admit I didn't expected it would run this smooth.
 
kopite19 said:
Currently on my 2010 MBP 13" with 4GB ram it runs a bit sluggishly when trying to play Football Manager and browse a bit. It ran a lot better in SL. Getting 8GB of RAM this week so should see an improvement.
Click to expand...

I do not know how it affects your gaming performance since i do not play on mac, but your overall performance should be more or less the same, i do not think it is about your ram. Try clean install.
 
meagain said:
Flash is sucking up all my memory and it gets progressively worse. I'm barely functioning and will need to reboot I guess. My hard drive is constantly crunching. IDK what's going on.
Click to expand...

That's why teh Steve says he hates Flash. 😛
 
My specs- MBP 13 2.26Ghz 160GB 2GB RAM

Upgraded to Lion recently, as compared to SL, boot and shutdown time is about 10-15 seconds slower, overall speed is pretty good but multitasking and having a few apps running simultaneously at the back does feel slightly sluggish, less smooth but not to the extent of lag and app freezing. Battery performance is getting less minutes as compared to SL. Will be upgrading to 4 GB RAM soon, should be back to SL speed after that.
 
It made both my current 2011 MBP 2.2 i7 1GB Video 750GB HDD & my older 2009 2.66 Core2Duo MBP loads faster!
 
Sometimes after running pages on Safari for awhile, my black Macbook 2.0 GHz will get sluggish and beachball. I think it has to do with Flash mostly.
 
yes only for a while when spotlight does indexing also boot up times are bad on my 2011 baseline mbp and my specs are better then yours imagine the performance on your laptop
 
Metzgermeister said:
I have the same MBP. Before installing Lion I cleaned my mac with cleanmymac. I removed about 5Gb of useless data (of course I check first before deleting) Installed Lion and it's really running smooth. In a way a whole lot better then good old Snow Leopard. I must admit I didn't expected it would run this smooth.
Click to expand...

ok, I'll try reinstalling the whole thing, cause I'm getting unhappier by the day 🙂
 
kopite19 said:
Currently on my 2010 MBP 13" with 4GB ram it runs a bit sluggishly when trying to play Football Manager and browse a bit. It ran a lot better in SL. Getting 8GB of RAM this week so should see an improvement.
Click to expand...

I have a 2010 MBP 13" with 4GB ram also. I sit and watch beach balls in Safari. The speed is unbearable. An OS update shouldn't bring my MBP to its knees like this.
 
I am on the fence with Lion. I have a early 2009 iMac, 8GB Ram, 9400M Graphics, 640GB hard drive. There are more beach balls, feels sluggish compared to my smooth experience with SL. I just don't like how it "feels" also. Just not snappy. It is a little buggy.

I have re-installed fresh and upgrade and both times I was not satisfied and fell back to SL.

Also, i'd day 50%/50% problem is that Lion uses a new version of some libraries with Time Machine and my NAS will not work with Lion at this time. It is a deal breaker for me, I need backups so I have to wait for that as well. I have to wait on my NAS vendor, but I wish you could fall back so I could still perform backups with Time Machine.

I am going to wait until they release some updates and see what they address before I try again. I am a little bummed out, but hopefully they will pep it up.
 
Last edited:
Yes he will slow down your mac. This is the slowest OSX version ever. It is horrible, I can hardly work on it, it drives me crazy, all I can do entire day is to watch rainbow ball. I almost crashed my macbook how mad I was and there is nothing I can do, no downgrade supported without losing all data. And I paid for this piece of ****!
 
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