Q: Problems With Lion (Found So Far).....

If you are having spinning beachballs with SL, you already have

problems that need to be addressed before even considering

Lion.  With SL, spinning beachballs usually mean that you have some

serious "housekeeping" to eliminate whatever is sucking

up CPU, memory, disk access time, disk space, etc.

A MBP of that age may well be due for a new hard drive -- a deteriorating IDE drive will often result in lots of beachballs without tripping any more overt warnings.

Suggestion: Use Disk Utility to do an Erase Free Space on your internal drive, preferably when booted from your OS install CD. If this seems to make your machine zippier, you need to seriously consider a new HD.

Soon.

Your HD is spending a lot of time re-reading and/or re-mapping blocks.

The average useful life of a hard drive is 3-5 years. Don't push your luck.

Ok both of you guys - "Housekeeping".

Thanks for your comments.

I will try some housekeeping AND enquire at my local mac repair centre how much a new HD will cost.

FD

A new HD should be your very last option, only to be adopted if all else fails.

If in fact your HD is *not* the cause of your problems then you will be paying out $$$ for nothing and the problem will still be there.

There are other things you should try first, and if these don't solve the problem, only then should you escalate to the next level. The "buy a new HD" option doesn't come until you've tried everything else.

FIrst step: is your hard drive simply too full? You should always have at least 20% of your hard drive free so that the computer can perform the operations it needs to do.

So check the size of your hard drive and how much of it you have used up.

If there's too much stuff on it, you need to get rid of whatever's taking up the space. Begin by moving movie files and videos to somewhere else, such as a flash drive, or just trash them.

Another thing to do before you go down the drastic route of a new HD is to do all the basic maintenance, using one of the many applications that will do it for you, such as Onyx.

Oh and by the way, you should also regularly make a complete bootable clone of your entire hard drive, to a firewire external drive. Doing so means you will always have a safety net, should anything bad happen such as a hard drive failure. Before you pay for a new internal hard drive you should spend your money on an external FireWire hard drive, and clone your system to that new drive. Carbon Copy Cloner will do this for you, and the CCC website has lots of useful other info.

Some progress.  Having reloaded Lion onto a new hard disk drive, the problems with performance (getting the coloured windmill alll the time) and jumping video playback in iTunes appear to have gone - only just done this so early days yet.  Not yet been able to check if the problems with Time Capsule have been fixed. 

This was after 6.5 hours on the phone to Crapple support who told me to reload Lion (without doing a backup first!) and converting FileVault to the Lion whole disk encryption system (they say the old FileVault is definitely not compatible with Lion/Time Capsule).  Having done this (having first bought a new backup drive and making a backup - just in case), I got an irrecoverable disk error which they could not overcome.  We had prevously checked the disk for errors, faults, etc so I'm sceptical that the disk is actually faulty. 

Crapple shipped a new disk drive which I fitted but this was not without issue - I tried to reload Snow Lepoard first using the disks shipped with this 6 month old MBP.  The MBP would not recognise the DVD.  After about 5 minutes whie I contemplated what to do next, the MBP automatically connected to the internet and downloaded Lion again (40 minutes download time on a 50Mb lnk!) - didn't realise I needed to format the disk first so this failed and I couldn't cancel so had to go through the whole process again - how to waste an hour of your life in one mouse click. 

I was then able to restore my home directory from the backup and the MBP is back to where it was before - as far as I can tell - except that the backup didn't seem to back up a number of applications including Office for Mac and Mavis Beacon typing tutor so I'm going to have to reload these from the original disks.  The data seems to be there so it remains to be seen if I've lost anything.  Will let you know.

What is more annoying is that a number of Apple apps including iMovie and Garage Band were not backed up and restored.  I have the original applications DVD that came with the MBP but the MBP says it can't use use the applications on the disk - no other explanation.  Not yet sure how to get around this one. 

I am convinced this is not the same version of Lion that I originally downloaded.  It is version 10.7.2 (have I missed an announcement from Crapple?).  The latest version has iCloud now and some of the dialog boxes look different.  I didn't get to know the previous version well enough to be precise about the changes. 

Crapple have now offered to refund me for all the Apple kit I bought which sadly, I'm going to take.  A premium product should not have these issues.  Back to good old reliable Windows which has its problems but Microsoft make an effort to solve them and don't keep everything secret.  My company is now dropping the iPhone too in favour of Android because Apple is just too proprietary - fine if it works - bad if not. 

I've problems with Finder. If I've a folder in "show items as icons" the icon size slider won't work. I use it all the time, so it's really ******* me off.

And a question: How can I collapse the toolbar of the window like i did before? I really miss that little button in the top right corner.

I've got 2 iMac 27" 's joined together, I've just decided that it's time to downgrade one of them to Snow Leopard 10.6.7 to go back to the better multi monitor support ! I've had enough !!! Wish me luck, I might end up downgrading both

With regards my previous post and downgrading to Leopard from Lion

Will my Lion time machine backup enable me to restore personal data if I do an 'erase and install' ?

I think I'm going to have to buy another 1TB USB drive and do a CCC backup as a belt and braces thing ?

I just really want to get spaces back, that was the reason I bought a iMac in the first place , watching those cool animations ;-) I will keep Lion on the other iMac and hopefully things will get better and I can upgrade both back to Lion at some point. At the moment Mission control just isn't as good as spaces was IMHO

I upgraded to Lion on my late 2008 iMac 3.06Ghz with 4Gb of ram (max allowed). If I try to run more than a couple of apps the machine slows down to snail pace and locks up and will not respon to mouse or keyboard input.  Had no option to power down. When I restarted the iMac only got to grey boot screen with Apple logo and spinning fan even after have an hour.  Ended up formatting harddrive and re-loading Snow Leopard and doing a restore from Time Machine.  A couple days down the line the same thing happened so I have just started from clean hard drive again and gone back to Snow Leopard.  Seems to me that Lion uses far more resources than Snow Leopard.  It is very like a MS Windows experience - Pants!

Anyone had similar experience? 

Come on Apple you need to fix this!

I have an iPhone and iPad and use MobileMe.  Gonna have to switch to Lion eventually for iCloud support unless Apple add iCloud support to Snow Leopard PLEASE!!

No similar experience. Tell Apple through their feedback channel, this is a user to user forum, so your complaints won't be heard by Apple here.

>> Gonna have to switch to Lion eventually for iCloud support unless Apple add iCloud support to Snow Leopard PLEASE!!>>

Snow Leopard has had it's final update, so I can't see iCloud ever being a part of it. Either concentrate on fixing your system, or go back to Snow Leopard and forego the advantages that millions are using in Lion.

As for this Thread......Yawn.........

Good Luck

marvintheandroid wrote:

 

Anyone had similar experience? 

 

Yes- I did. I'm a long-time Mac user and I think I know the Mac OS quite well.

After trying to work with Lion for about a month I too started getting these total system freezes, which seemed to be cumulative over that period, i.e. they built up and became more frequent over time. And yes, of course I tried clearing out all caches etc. and also doing all the maintenance routines.

In the end my work was being seriously slowed down so I just cloned back to Snow Leopard (like all experienced Mac users I always have a clone, just in case).

Neil from Oz wrote:

 

Snow Leopard has had it's final update

- and you need to join the Apostrophe Protection Society.

Listen andrdroid, you are a liar. Do you know how I know? Because 3.06Ghz was not availavle in 2008.

Go Tom. Too many witty, intelligent replies to keep up with. Try it in a live post, not a long dead one that only you want to keep going for some pathetic gain. Again,,,,,,,,,,YAWN,,,,,,,,,,,

remove cache from both user account and the system -

~/Library/Caches

/Mac HD/Library/caches-trash both of 'em

go to system preferences, users and groups and then onto log in items and remove everything

Go to finder /Mac HD/library/Preferences and we are looking for com.apple.loginitems.plist and com.apple.loginwindows.plist  trash both of those files and repeat the process in from your home diretory

Do not empty the trash yet reboot and then empty the trash

After that repair disk permissions 

if the issue persists do an archive and install

if it is still goin on after that do a clean erase and install of lion

This has worked for lots, and I mean lots of friends who have been having these kinds of issues (myself included)

and be carefull I have noticed some friends macs who go back to snow leopard then update and they have the same issue-hanging/unresponsive apps, long indexing/nerver stops, hard to get through the boot process, needing SMC resets in order to even turn back on.....fun, fun....