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jswin Author

Level 1

10 points

OS X Lion is incredibly slow (even after index)

I've installed Lion on my iMac (24-inch, Early 2008, 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM) and it has become INCREDIBLY slow. I've heard many people saying that the machine would return to its typical blazing speeds after indexing finished, and it has — I've left it on overnight a couple of times to make sure everything finished, and it's still much slower than it was while running Snow Leopard. Virtually every application hangs — when typing in Finder (for example to rename a folder) the text lags several seconds behind what I'm typing. Mission Control is terrible — the graphics lag behind and it takes several seconds for the animation to finish. Often the animation doesn't appear at all, and it just flickers between frames awkwardly until the mission control display finally appears.

I'm working on backing up all my data and doing a clean install … I'll see what happens, but if it doesn't work I'm going to have to roll back to snow leopard, because this is ridiculous. I've never seen an OS change slow down a machine so much since Vista … hopefully it's fixable. Any thoughts on what might be the cause?

(Oh, and activity monitor scans look normal … nothing's hogging the CPU, and there's slightly less than 2GB of RAM free almost all the time.)

iMac Core 2 24, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jul 23, 2011 11:59 AM

288 replies

Aug 9, 2012 8:16 AM in response to wvwvwvwvwvwvwv

This worked great for me, eventhough some stuff (if not all) is set back at factory results, I know see my 6,1 iMac has available over 1,5Gb of memory most of the time. What a relief, everything seems to go significanlty faster now.

After this I will try the verify/check disk util at boot. And hope that my Imac (6,1) keeps working fine agian now...

NOYB234

Level 1

31 points

Jul 4, 2013 7:29 AM in response to Crofoot

Lion is slow because it is a huge program with stupid bells and whistles that amount to disk and ram ussage. Starting to look a lot like MSDOS. Oh well UNIX is still the best programming format but it will soon be obsolete as does everything eles. There is new out there but patents are holding up technology. That and law suits. But frankly no matter what Apple told you you should not have to do anything to make an OS to be faster. It is or isn't. That is as simple as it gets regardless what Apple says. I wish I could go back to an earlier OS.

aris00

Level 1

0 points

Dec 26, 2014 1:55 AM in response to AlexGo

Hey there AlexGo,

Your reply got me to check my login items and lo & behold I spotted the item that has caused me trouble in the past but I had forgotten:

CNQL1208_ButtonManager (or something like that, gone now)

This is the Canon Scanner utility that monitors the buttons in front of your scanner so it may launch your email, scanning program etc. It was installed with the drivers for my Canon Lide 35 scanner.

The remarkable characteristic is that my computer would be very SLOW to interact with but the CPU would not be busy at all. I think this program somehow was stalling events as it ran causing stuff to slow down. I don't know.

All better now!

OS X Lion is incredibly slow (even after index)