Laptops :: MacBook Pro Performance Becoming Too Slow?
Jul 16, 2010
I have a macbook pro, 2.4 ghz, 2 gb ram, graphics nvidia geforce 8600 - it's about 3 years old.
The problem is that my mac is becoming slower and slower, sometimes it becomes unresponsive with simple tasks such as loading several tabs in the browser (i normally use firefox). And it happens too with photoshop, illustrator and basically any software.
The worst, is running 3D software in it. Some few months ago i could work fluently on a 3D project, now i just can't make anything that it just breaks down or crashes. Even scrolling windows is a pain in the b*tt.
I know that 3D software might be way too heavy for a 2gb ram and my graphics ain't the best... but i'm sure something is wrong with my computer because it was working fine some months ago...
I've been making software updates, i use Onyx like once a week to run the scripts, i've made a SMART hardware checkup and it says it's everything ok...
The harddrive is 160 gb and it has 20gb free space. It doesn't have much space left, but i don't think this could be the source of the problem.
Could it be a graphics card problem? i've been looking for drivers update in nvidia website, i can't find them for mac.
Or maybe some more extra ram could resolve the problem. But i don't know if i want to take the risk of spending 200 euros on + 4gb for nothing..
I've been looking for some info on the older 2007 MacBook Pro battery specs and stats, etc., but have been somewhat unsuccessful. Lately my MBP has been draining the battery at a much quicker pace than normal. This machine is only a year old now (however CoconutBattery says the battery is 16 months old). Still, the battery capacity shouldn't have diminished too significantly. Before I restored the Mac and installed the Windows 7 Beta, I could average 3-4 hours on a full charge. Normally, I would keep WiFi + Bluetooth enabled, an external monitor attached, several USB peripherals plugged in, and the main display would be set to maximum brightness. 3-4 hours was pretty nice considering the amount of power the machine could have been using.
After I partitioned my hard drive, the battery life was cut in half on the OS X side. Windows 7 power management was even worse. I figured that there may have been extra disk activity causing this problem. After I finished toying with Redmond's new OS, I removed the Windows partition and moved on from there. I know after I removed the partition, I was getting excellent battery life initially. Once that short period ended, it went downhill from there. The battery meter has become surprisingly accurate as of late; in a minute or so, you can easily watch the percentages drop 1-2%, which appears abnormal. I can manage 3 hours on a single charge at best, but I usually get less. I decided to take greater care in cycling the battery, in hopes of nursing it back to health, so to speak. It doesn't appear to be working so well. Enabling WiFi and other peripherals only drains more power, but turning them off again adds only 5 minutes. So when I'm using several devices at once, I'm lucky to get a little over 2 hours. Turning off menu items and background apps does nothing either.
It's been this way for several weeks now, and yet, iStat, System Profiler, and CoconutBattery all report seemingly acceptable and consistent battery info: 86% Battery health, around 180 charge cycles, and the capacity is around 4700mAh (out of the original 5500) for now. The computer believes all is well. Performance says otherwise. I'd like to think that physically the battery seems to be okay. I've cycled and calibrated it several times. I have read reviews that indicate that Santa Rosa MacBooks with new batteries have averaged similar runtimes to the ones I experience now, but I know mine has usually bested all of the reported tests. It just seems wrong for the average runtime to go from almost 4 hours to 2 when the battery is (supposed to be) maintaining the same health level. I have AppleCare if it needs to be replaced, since this drastic change in usage time is very noticeable and counterproductive for me, but it could just be the computer (or me for that matter). Is this behavior normal for a battery of this age? What should I look into? If this is normal behavior I can live with it, but I would prefer to get as much out of the one I have.
Below are the specs to my Macbook pro and current version of the OS. I've been thinking about upgrading my OS but wondering if this will slow down my system. The only reason why I am considering to upgrade is because I want to purchase the Roxio Toast 10 Titanium and noticed its requires 10.5. Is it worth me to upgrade? If so how do I go about...I'm new to the macworld so I assume just go to the app store and ask for the cds to upgrade to the latest version?
System Version:Mac OS X 10.4.11 (8S2167) Kernel Version:Darwin 8.11.1 Boot Volume:Macintosh HD Capacity is 111.47 GB Available 65.88 GB
Model Name:MacBook Pro 15" Model Identifier:MacBookPro2,2 Processor Name:Intel Core 2 Duo Processor Speed:2.16 GHz Number Of Processors:1 Total Number Of Cores:2 L2 Cache (per processor):4 MB Memory:1 GB Bus Speed:667 MHz Boot ROM Version:MBP22.00A5.B07 SMC Version:1.12f5
I just installed 8 GB Crucial memory for my 13" MacBook Pro (Late-2011; 2.8 Ghz). I immediately noticed scrolling on safari was jumpy or skipping. It is like this in other applications as well. Even zooming in/out of pdf's and using iphoto. I only purchased this laptop in Feb, and this bothers me. I tested using the Geekbench app. Every benchmark was about equal or much higher except for Processor Integer Performance, more specifically "Image Decompress multi-threaded scalar." It went from 138.3 down to 134.3 Mpixels/sec. Do I have lemon memory? I would almost rather go back to the 4 GB if this laggy performance is a continual issue. One of the things I love about Mac's is now becoming irritating.
I have a Black Macbook. 2.2ghz, 1GB Ram, running Snow Leopard. Recently I've been finding my laptop rather sluggish and slow when performing tasks and opening applications. Firefox will often be quite slow at performing mundane tasks as well as flicking between applications that are open which is also slow. I use a couple of apps to help clear out unnecessary files etc to help with performance and stuff but clearly this doesn't appear to be working.
I have a 2009 2.53GHz MacBook Pro which I bought a couple months ago. It's been working great, but lately, I've been noticing a lot of strange issues with video playback/general graphics and UI. These includes:- Laggy video performance, frame skipping, generally 2x slow video -- on both iTunes and web video. It's not as smooth as it used to be, though admittedly not totally unbarable - VLC shows a black screen, doesn't show the video - Randomly pixelated icons in the dock (it's almost like the Mac picks a new one everyday to pixelate), dock animation not 100% smooth, although fairly good (not sure if it used to be this way)
If I was to hook my MacBook Pro 13inch 4GB RAM, 250 HD to a monitor and use the Magic Mouse and Apple wireless keyboard would it slow the performance of my laptop?
I have a 2007 Santa Rose MBP and it has started to run very slow during the bootup and actual use of it. Here is how the bootup goes:
I turn it on and get the bong sound and a full white screen. In about 10 seconds I get the Apple log and in about another 10 seconds the circle that rotates as it boots up.
Then at about 2 minutes it changes color to a light blue color with the pointer on the screen. Then in about another 10 seconds changes to a darker shade of blue. At a total of 3 mins and 40 secs I then get the desktop with the space type background and in a couple more seconds the Mac OS X login screen. It takes around a minute until I am able to type anything. For awhile before that time I can type I get the beachball.
Here are the details of what I recently did: I had a 250GB hard drive in my MBP running the newest version of Leopard. I was down to around 50GB free so I purchased a 640GB hard drive. I also was due to upgrade to Snow Leopard. I had an external USB enclosure that I could temporarily use. What I did is put the 640GB hard drive in that external enclosure and formatted it with the GUID partition table. I then used SuperDuper to mirror my internal hard drive to the external hard drive. I have a lot of programs installed and a lot data on my hard drive so didn't want to lose any of this.
Once the mirroring of my internal hard drive was completed to my external 640GB hard drive I then booted from that drive (using it externally and selecting option at bootup). Things seemed to run fine with no issues. I then after booting up from this external hard drive did a Snow Leopard upgrade to this external hard drive. Once again this external hard drive appeared to run perfectly normal.
After things seemed to be okay I then opened up the MBP and swapped hard drives so the 640GB drive was my new internal HD. I then booted and once again I used it some and things appeared to work normally.
After this later in the evening I installed two programs, Final Cut Studio 3 and Logic Studio 9. As far as I can remember my computer was acting a little odd and after a reboot that is when all the above issues started.
As far as I can tell this never started until those two installs. Is it a chance I didn't try it out enough but I remember even with the HD being external USB my system appeared to run faster than ever. I even think the program didn't start with Final Cut Studio but started with Logic Studio 9
Any idea of what caused this? Even after my computer running it's VERY slow to the point of being almost unusable. For example if I open Word it takes 3 minutes or so to open. Almost any action causes the beachball to appear.
After looking at the Apple site I did both a PRAM erase (using Command Option P and N) and also a SMC reset by removing the battery and power cord and pressing the power button for over 5 seconds and neither fixed it.
I opened up Disk Utility and did a Verify Permission and got the following information:
Permissions differ on "usr/share/derby", should be drwxr-xr-x, they are lrwxr-xr-x. Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreS...as been modified and will not be repaired.
Since it said it didn't repair it I did a Repair Disk Permissions but that didn't seem to fix it.
I have a 2nd gen white Macbook (2,1) that my wife uses for only email and web search (I have moved on to Macbook Pro). Her Macbook is running very slowly. I've looked through these forums and found snippets of advice. I did the Mac Hardware Test, Extended Test, and it says nothing is wrong. There's 1mb RAM, a 2mb processor, and 59gb of storage left. She has only two programs at the most open at one time. I'm lost as to what's making it run slowly. Would bumping the RAM to 2mb
I've got a Dual 2 Ghz G5 with 10.5.8 loaded on it, yet I'm getting very slow flash performance. The PC that I'm typing on is a $300 Toshiba with a celeron processor but it does a great job with flash (safari/firefox/IE across the board). Is there a remedy for this? I googled one tip that said to disable hardware acceleration, but it didn't make a difference. When I opened up the Activity Monitor, processor usage was up to 100-150%, so something is not right, the G5 should chew through this.
I may be using the incorrect terminology, but videos like u-tube, are very slow, to the point of just sitting there, frozen, while it "loads" for a minute or two, then runs for a couple of seconds, then stops to load again, sometimes for several minutes.
I have the small macbook, with SL, 2.4 GHz, 2 GB, 667 MHz. I know this is a standard problem, but there must be something I can do to make it better. I thought maybe the SL would help, but no.
Flash on Safari 4 was very quick, but after my update to Safari 5, all flash games slowed down. A flash game which I play very often is 'Restaurant City' on Facebook. Try it out and tell me what you experience using safari 5. I have no problems if I used Mozilla on my mbp, but once I use Safari, I need 5 seconds to press a single button in the game.
Is anyone having slow SATA performance on their 09 mac pro in bootcamp. Just booting into windows takes a long time and trying to burn a disc or transfer something to an external hard drive takes a long time. I created a large iso file and burned it to a BD-50 RW disc in windows and it took approximately 4 hours and it was set to burn at the fastest speed which should of been 2x but never reached any faster than 0.7x. I burned the same iso in mac osx through disc utility and it took less than 2 hours. I transferred the same iso file to an external usb hard drive in windows and that took 4 hours which is extremely slow. Does anyone know how to get SATA operating at a normal speed. I checked in the device manager and it is set to operate in DMA mode.
I have an external USB drive attached to my iMac. I've noticed that whenever there's heavy read/write activity on the drive (such as un-raring a large file or transcoding a video that's stored there), my whole system feels sluggish.
I've got an I-MAC withe 2.4Ghz intel core 2 due processor and 2 GB 667 Mhz SDRAM. Since I've installed the MAC OS X 10.7.3 the performance has deteriorated so much that it gets annoying. how I can pimp my Imac?
I have an iMac G5 with 1 GB of RAM. It has got really slow lately. I've used Mac Keeper to get rid of uneeded files, etc., but it is still really slow, especially when viewing or working with video. Will adding RAM facilitate?
I've just installed an SSD in my new iMac 27", see here. I'm fast learning though (diglloydTools and other commentators) that once the application has loaded the SSD isn't involved very much from there on, so there are the same old performance problems. I'm finding in Firefox/Firebug where there is a large DOM (nothing exceptional) performance is still woeful.
So, baring in mind the Core i7 processor is under $200 and it would appear to have been possible to upgrade the iMac's processors in the past, does anybody have any advice for me? What parts will I need, have you done it and what was your experience, any common problems with doing this, are the parts themselves upgradeable (the quoted link only suggests they are) etc.
I have had this issue for a while. No matter what I try, Flash movies are SLOW on my 1.5GHz PowerBook G4. I have 1.5GB of RAM, Leopard, and the latest Flash (Flash 9). Every video and game that I run in Flash is choppy unless I set the quality to "low". This occurs in Safari, Camino, and the standalone Flash Player application itself.
I am seeing very slow performance when using spaces and expose in 10.6. I am on a mac mini with the 9400m graphics chip. It worked perfectly in Leopard, and now it runs at what appears to be 1fps. Sometimes it doesn't even seem to animate, it just jerks into place, from starting point to the end. I realize one solution could be "do a fresh install" but that seems like quite the pain at the moment, and is extremely undesirable. The upgrade worked perfectly on my macbook pro with similar specs. Is there anything I can reset or reinstall that might refresh the graphics performance?
Not sure why, but when I run my SL in 64 bit it runs significantly slow when compared to 32-bit on my umbp late 2008 2.4 ghz, 4gb ram and 500gb hdd. when running on 32-bit, my umbp boots in less than 15 sec and loading the native apps are very snappy and responsive (safari/finder/preview, etc). But when I boot in 64-bit. It takes like 45 sec to boot (it keeps spinning the white circle during the boot up) and even loading safari and rendering the default page will take like couple of secs which is noticeably slow and opening pdf in preview is slow and scrolling the pdf is noticeably slow and sometimes hangs and which does not happen in 32-bit mode.
If I click on application folder on the doc, it opens the folder before I release the mouse button in 32-bit mode, but in 64-bit, it takes upto 5 sec to open the folder. I tried this couple of times including rebooting the umbp. It is not crashing in 64 bit, but it is noticeably slow. Which is making me depressed because I was thinking to upgrade this laptop to 6gb ram. Now I am not sure if i want to upgrade.
Just upgraded to a 27" quad-core iMac yesterday and I noticed the startup time is much slower than it should be once I migrated all of my files from my old 24" iMac over. I usually keep my system up for months at a time, so startup time isn't an issue, but the question is: Does a slow startup time indicate that once I'm up and running, the system could be much quicker, too, or is that slow issue solely restricted to just the startup time?
I recently had to upgrade my OS to 10.6 (then to 10.6.8 via update). After the upgrade fro 10.5 though my computer had been running slow, especially safari. I haven't do anything different besides running the update. The only new program(s) I have is Diablo 3 which I know tkes up a lot of processing power, but that wouldn't explain the overall, extreme drop in speed when I'm not playing it.
PowerBook G4, 1.5ghz, 2gb ram, 80gb HD, Superdrive. It shows I have the AirPort Extreme card installed. Problem, I get poor (slow performance on my home wifi) and in some areas I get no signal or drop the signal. On my PC laptops I get good signal and fairly good speed. Using a Linksys wirless 2.4ghz wireless G router. Could my wireless card need replacing? If I get a wireless N router will the airport extreme card pull the N?
I just got a brand new Mac Mini 2,26 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2 gig RAM, and it's hooked up to my tv with a mini-DVI adapter. Snow Leopard installed. I noticed right away that the screen looks really sluggish, with screen tearing and laggy video performance. Playing videos in Plex for instance there is a lot of screen tear and I had to set the display to 720p to get it decent, and even then it's rough, even on SD videos! So I ran Xbench, and got a remarkable slow score on OpenGL; 43. My MacBook Pro running with the 9400M card got 97.
1) I am in the possession of a June 2004 PowerMac G5 DP 1.8. 2) It's the AGP+PCI variety (not PCI-X, not PCIe). 3) It's running Leopard 10.5.8 4) I've got an Ultra 6800 DDL installed.
Main Question:
What is the best way to add another (3rd) monitor?
I have a new MacBook (Dec '08) and everything is working fine with one exception. When I type numbers into the calculator app they appear on the screen in slow motion with a nice long pause as each number typed is displayed. On our iMac the calculator app just flies along and has no problem keeping up no matter how fast I enter in numbers. Any ideas where to start on this one? Besides the standard software we have installed Microsoft Office and Handbrake.
