I upgraded my iMac to Snow Leopard this afternoon, and now I'm renaming folders, deleting folders, dragging folders into other folders that live in other windows, etc. etc. As I'm doing this, I notice a sluggishness in the Finder that wasn't there before. The actions I'm performing are accompanied by a slight delay. Dragging folders to other folders is especially problematic. Is anyone else experiencing something like this? More importantly, does anyone have a suggestion about what might be going on or how to fix it?
20" iMac 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo,
Mac OS X (10.6),
13" 2.53GHz MacBook Pro
Right or control click the MacintoshHD icon. Click Get Info. In the Get Info window you will see Capacity and Available. *Make sure you always have a minimum of 10% to 15% free disk space at all times.*
I have at least 175GB of free disk space and 3GB of RAM. I do quite a bit of file/folder sorting from time to time, and my Finder has always been very snappy until I installed Snow Leopard this afternoon.
I won't swear that my Finder is back to its usual snappy self just yet, but restarting a couple of times has definitely had a beneficial effect on the responsiveness of the Finder. Who would have thought? Thanks!
One of the first things that happens when you change massive amounts of files with a major upgrade is that Spotlight needs to re-index your drive. This has been known to cause a sluggish feel for a couple of hours for some systems.
Just so y'all know: My Finder is still behaving sluggishly when I do certain things. For example, sometimes I have to click on a folder name four or five times before I can edit it. The original problem was definitely not caused by Spotlight indexing. Not sure why such an obvious (although admittedly minor) issue would be affecting my machine but no one else's.
I am having the same sluggish operation problem. Right now I am doing a permissions verify, so can't yet restart, but my attempted install of iLife really hung - the anticipated installation time was 15 hours. Hence the verify. I'll post my results after completing the permissions verify and three restarts. Funny, with OS 7.5.3 and later (up to OS 9) successive restarts were mandatory. And now they are again.
I'm having all sorts of problems with Finder also. I performed a clean install, repaired permissions, and have rebooted several times. THe installation resides on a 250 GB with 240 GB of free space.
In my case, I get a number of different issues. There seem to be delays (spinning beach ball) when scrolling through long lists of files, connecting to other shares on my local network, sometimes just opening and operating different programs (especially Safari). The system also freezes up from time to time, sometimes just a few seconds, sometimes the lockup last over ten minutes or more, necessitating a hard reboot. My machine (an early 2007 iMac 24 inch with 4 GB of RAM) was a speed demon under Leopard. No stalls, no hickups, nada. It gets so bad under Snow Leopard that I'm forced to boot back into my Leopard partition to get any work done.
Another extraordinarily annoying problem are flaky display drivers. Even though the mac contains an nVidia graphics card, Apple's implementation is atrocious. I get screen shear and tear, failure to redraw after closing or moving windows, opened windows sometimes filled with garbage, losing the Dock from time to time (all matter inside the Dock is lost, no icons, nothing). It is so bad that the system once again is practically unusable.
In contrast, Snow Leopard on my 2009 macBook Pro 13" works like a charm. No freezes or delays, no video driver issues. The only problem I've found so far is a difficulty connecting to my MacMini, which still runs Tiger.
It appears that Apple may have not devoted the necessary resources to fully polish before releasing. It's ashame because the very selling point of the OS is the fact that it HAS been refined, polished and tuned with respect to Leopard. Perhaps Apple should go a bit slower with its consumer electronics ambitions and spend a bit more time and money on its core business - designing computers and computer software.
Repairing permissions had no effect for me. Nor can I detect any problems in the log files or using Activity Monitor. I wonder whether the "new and improved" Finder has a few rough edges still. It's easy to forget that SL includes substantial upgrades under the hood, particularly with the Finder and and TCPIP stack. Add to this the transition to full 64-bit goodness, increased parallelization under Grand Central and the regiggering of Finder and the core OS applications to offload work to the GPU, and you have a formula for bugginess in unexpected ways. I hope 10.6.1 makes a quick appearance.
I'm not an engineer, but if I were having such serious problems following an upgrade to Snow Leopard, I would reinstall Snow Leopard from scratch. It wouldn't be the first time I've seen what appeared to be a perfectly normal OS X installation go bad. Hopefully, you cloned your startup drive before installing Snow Leopard (just in case).
There are definitely some bugs in Snow Leopard but, personally, I haven't seen anything major. Just this afternoon I started getting hordes of old iCal notifications popping up on my Desktop. Irritating, but not a deal breaker.
For those who did clone their startup drives before installing Snow Leopard, an obvious reminder is to make sure NOT to overwrite that backup with new backups of your system post Snow Leopard installation until you're absolutely sure that everything is copacetic. Personally, I made a separate clone of my new Snow Leopard startup drive.
I also have slow Finder response and corresponding problems retrieving file directories. I view in column view, so it is not an issue with view options/calculating sizes, though I changed this anyway in case there was something I don't know about. I am trying to access folders on my network drive, and it is sloooower than 10.5 ever was. This is dispiriting because the "faster" Finder was why I upgraded.
All grumbling aside, I followed the directions for install that came with my disk, and other than getting some improvement after fiddling with the third party services I installed because the lack of a usable CM is ridiculous (therefore, removing them), I'm still experiencing significant delays retrieving my files compared to with Leopard, but my machine no longer locks up when I hit a keyboard shortcut. I guess I could restart 10 more times or something... but where's the improved "Finding"?
I noticed yesterday that my 10.6 laptop dropped my airport network connection suddenly (this was 3 days after my latest install *grimace, start the freak-out again* and I didn't have this problem with on my other (nonSL) macs [I have 6 in my house, all different specs] and I read in these forums that delayed network wonkiness is happening to some other people, too). After following some advice about changing my airport and network specifications, thereby changing the channel manually to 9 and changing the security to WPA/Personal from WPA2... this slow Finder issue was resolved, and now retrieving files across my network is super-quick compared to with 10.5.8!
Are your problems with Finder occurring when working across a network, because if they are, maybe your network is the problem. I dunno why the upgrade wrecked this kind of havoc, but so far this workaround works for me. I'll try to update here if the problem returns in a couple of days.
