Snow Leopard = downgrade in performance with serious Bugs found

My work notebook is the same as yours and I've had no performance issues at all with my MBP. Every program that is verified to be SL compatible works as well as it did in Leopard or better. That includes but is not limited to FireFox, games, Mail, Office, iWork, iLife, CS3, and SandVox.

I feel quite confident in saying that the problem isn't with SL but with your installation and suggest that you start by creating a new user account and logging into it. If your problems disappear you'll know the issue is somewhere in your current user account. If your problems follow into the new account your issues are more broad based and may require a fresh install of SL.

Since an Apple keyboard comes with a full set of keys, unlike the typical dumb cellphone, and I'm an old fogey who thinks texting should be limited to a dumb cellphone... I'd not have posted were I not sure the problem is in your installation. I currently have FireFox running with six tabs all showing a different YouTube video. I also have QuickTime showing three different movie trailers playing and Safari is playing another set of YouTube videos and Pulsar is playing XM Radio. (It is quite a cacophony at the moment!) Meanwhile, I have a my iPhone syncing in the background. I can move from one tab to the other in FireFox and each video is playing smoothly. Over to Safari where the videos are also smooth and I can switch back to QuickTime and the trailers are smooth. Meanwhile I'm typing quickly in Mail and not dropping any keys. Convinced?

Works fine on my MBP with SL WHILE running WoW, Word 2008, Mail, iCal, iWeb and Activity Monitor. It's your install I believe.

Peace,
Iggy

After snow leopard both may 1+1/2 years old macbook and my 6 month old imac, became insanely, fast though buggy...

This was the first time I had problems with a Mac Os X upgrade... Live Mesh stop working, GraphPad prism is full of bugs, my printer stop working, quicksilver and cyberduck also... This morning I finally found in a thread an old HP driver that made my printer work again. Cyberduck and quicksilver problems were solved during last weekend. But still no resolution for GraphPad and Live Mesh.

I tried to use idisk sync instead of Live Mesh, but unfortunately idisk is still as useless as in the day it was launched... It slowness makes it unusable, what Live Mesh takes 3 to 5 hours to sync it took more than 2 days with idisk just to upload, and after that it still has to download everything again during the proper idisk sync. Simply useless! iDisk might be nice to share one or two files with colleagues, but forget about using idisk to sync large folders between macs. Launching idisk in finder is still a shoot in the foot, a slap in the face and a spit in the forehead, it slows everything... Oh Apple, are you sleeping or what?

The only good thing about snow leopard is that it really speeds up your Mac, but it gives more troubles than benefits.

The big surprise for me was that Apple always told that snow leopard would bring stability and performance improvements, though with that I would never expect the big amount of problems it brought! Specially when in previous upgrades (I am using Mac Os X since 10.0) I never had a single problem...

Message was edited by: PedroCarvalho32

Bleive me, I have had upgrade OSx issues in the past and have been very vocal about them, but this upgrade has gone smoother and better for me than any other I have ever attmpted. Everything works as it should with some very very small exceptions. One for instance is that the volume control always ended up at full volume whenever I turned on my Macbook Pro, but trashing the audio preferences fixed that. Another is the clicking on a .wmv file does not start quicktime but instead says "quicktime is needed..." but right clicking on the .wmv file and choosing "start with quicktime" fixes that. The last being that my printer doesn't have a driver written for it yet.
Otherwise I have had no issues whatsoever and am very impressed with this upgrade. MY only issue really is that I haven't yet seen any advantage to snow leopard. I could keep it on my system, or I can go back to leopard. Makes no difference to me!

I have had problems with not being able to combine individual pdf files (in Leopard it was a simple drag and drop) and VPN.

Is it possible to roll back to Leopard without having to install all other software?

Why do you blame Apple for the failure of third party applications?

Check with those vendors for updates, and if they don't have any, ask why they haven't been testing with the Snow Leopard developer seeds for oh, the past three months or so.

So I have a 1 y/o white Macbook, dual core Intel 2.4ghz with 2GB of ram. I recently "upgraded" to Snow Leopard and have encountered multiple bugs and difficulties, particularly when multitasking.

In particular, I found that if I was rendering something in FCE and then migrated over to, say, Disk Utility to make an image from a DVD, Disk Utility would crash. I experienced this problem multiple times when asking my Macbook to perform two relatively difficult tasks--the first would continue to run, but the second would immediately crash.

If someone answers that this, too, is due to my "install," would they kindly explain to me how the installation of the OS could effect such things, please? Don't merely affirm something without offering an explanation, as it, simply put, makes you look stupid and/or ignorant, and all told, not to be believed.

Is this your only problem? If so I think I can help.

PDF handling is either a) Not the same as it was in 10.5, or b) problematic.
The workaround. It appears that if you try and put pages at the beginning or end of a document SL doesn't like it. The files will be saved as two separate documents instead of one combined.
Seems you must insert within a document, (between pages).
So the PDF you want to add to is one page long. So what? Open it in Preview, choose +Insert blank page...+ from the Edit menu. Your document is now two pages long. You can remove the blank page any time after the document becomes two or more pages.

Keep an eye on the name of the document in the toolbar. It'll say how many documents and pages make up what you are seeing in the current window.

PedroCarvalho32 wrote:
The big surprise for me was that Apple always told that snow leopard would bring stability and performance improvements, though with that I would never expect the big amount of problems it brought! Specially when in previous upgrades (I am using Mac Os X since 10.0) I never had a single problem...

Message was edited by: PedroCarvalho32

Are you suggesting that Cheetah had less bugs than Snow? Seriously?

I'd like to chime in on this one as well. I, too, have had similar performance degradation since the upgrade. I can't have my MBP multitask without everything getting very slow. The computer even has lengthy delays to keystrokes.

My son, who uses an older MB, has not had these issues, so I have to believe that there is something quirky about my setup. I really am not using any software other than the Apple standards -- mail, Safari, iChat, iPhoto, iCal, etc. I have 2GB RAM. I ended up looking at Activity Monitor, and when I look at the memory pie chart, if I restart, there is a large portion of green, after using the MBP for a while, it loses all the green. I have already restarted -- which helps for a short time, and repaired permissions.

I will try a Archive and Install and create a new user account to see if that fixes the problem.

Anyone else have any other ideas on what to do?

Thanks,

Boris

Boris Beckert wrote:
I'd like to chime in on this one as well. I, too, have had similar performance degradation since the upgrade. I can't have my MBP multitask without everything getting very slow. The computer even has lengthy delays to keystrokes.

I'm not suggesting that Snow Leopard is bug free-no software ever is, rather that there is also something wrong with the OPs install in addition.

I will try a Archive and Install and create a new user account to see if that fixes the problem.

Anyone else have any other ideas on what to do?

Clone your drive before you do. Now this may be overkill but it's been good for me, boot from the clone and zero the SL destination drive over night. Install to that and bring over what you need using drag and drop or Migration Assistant. +Be careful of any app that is not SL compatible.+

It's hard to tell just what might be clogging up your computer but it probably has something to do with a program that was installed and forgotten about. It might involve the driver for a long gone printer or scanner, perhaps some font or fonts you've forgotten about. Whatever it is (or they are since it could be more than one thing) it can be difficult to figure out even with Console reports to look at.

The reason we recommend creating a new account as one of the first steps is to attempt differentiating between a local problem and a global problem. If in the new account everything works as expected we can start looking to your account as the problem. There are a few quick things to look at (fonts and login items, for example) and sometimes I simply recommend moving data to the new account and killing off the old. It is rather drastic but sometimes the easiest move. If the new account doesn't solve it we can look to a few things in the main library; fonts again, various plug-ins and the like. But generally a so-called clean install is called for. I generally recommend the user move in slower after this step just to make sure the computer isn't acting up. One hardware problem that pops up with a newly upgraded OS is 'marginal' RAM - it seems that each newer version of the OS is a bit less forgiving than the previous version and RAM that seemed perfectly fine before now isn't. It's one of the reasons I look for RAM with a lifetime guarantee.

So start with the new account and move on from there.