Lion running slow on Macbook Pro Mid 2010

Hi John,

After following the steps you advised, my machine worked ok for a couple of hours, then with all apps closed the cpu use increased ofver about a 1 minute window to 100%, it stayed that way overnight and when i opened mail, the machinne froze up. Needing a restart via the power button.

It appearsto me that it may be come kind of hardware failure? any thoughts on this would be appeciated.

I have an older 2007 21" iMac with a 2.3 GHz core duo and 4GB DDR2 RAM, running Lion and in an almost identical configuration, so far its been running like a dream since Lion was installed. Non to the issues others have experienced and certainly nothing like my Macbook.

As you seem to be well versed in Macs, a question/some suggestions would be appreciated;

As I would really like to wait for the release of the much rumored new slimline MacBook Pro than to re place it with a current model. I'd like to ask for your help in deciding on the best plan for me.

My thoughts are to opt for Mac Mini as I already have the trackpad, aluminum keyboard, and 24" mac led display.

So my question is, would the high end spec Mac Mini with the 2.7GHz i7 CPU, 8GB DDR3 RAM, a 750GB Serial ATA Drive @7200rpm plus a 250GHz SSD be able to deliver an equal or hopefully better performance than my current MacBook Pro with a 2.53GHz dual core processor and 4GB DDR3 RAM.

It is used heavily for email and document, spreadsheet work and medium use for photo editing and occasional video editing, this latter mostly short clips for projects to be used as part of computer presentations and a little "home/family" video work.

One further question, would the server version with the 2.0GHz Quad core CPU with the same RAM and drive specs as above deliver acceptable performance, as I see the Graphics processor looks to be of a lower spec?

Appreciate your comments on this and thanks

Anthony

Hi Anthony, followed this thread for a while. Your post make me ask: Did you have problems running SnowLeopard, and if not, why would it be a hardware problem ?

Second, what is status after the reboot ? running slow or ?

Best regards

Jan Storgaard

Denmark

Hi Jan,

No problems in Snow Leopard, ran like a dream all the time.

Rebooted 4 times in total, one reinstall of OS X the other 3 were full clean installs and recover from Time Machine. The last one was to a recoveryr of apps and datad predatinf Lion install/upgrade then just pulling off the data to brig files up to date.

On all these occasions restarts were very slow, even on occasions having the spinning beach ball on the login screen for many minutes requiring a power buttom restart befor machine would boot.

Pnce booted it would be idling for a time, an hour ot 2, but if you opened mail, safari or pages it would slow down noticably and beginn to freeze up for varying periods of time untill finaly CPU going off the scale, and on a coul[le of occasions cutting out on termal trip.

My almost identicaly configured older iMac still runs like a dream doing the same stuff i do on the laptop.

Any ideas?

All the best

Anthony

Hi All

I am having exactly the same problem since upgrading to 10.7, I have an early 2008 Macbook pro 2.4Ghz 4GB RAM, I have tried everthing inluding a fresh install, eventully I partitioned the HDD and installed 10.6 Snow Leopard and that worked fine, eventually I found that I had attachemets program runing which I got free with playback, when I closed attachements the laptop became more stable however till not like runing 10.6 - I would suggest seeing what is using up the processing power and close that program if possible.

Hi

I have a MBP mid 2010, and experienced problems like you. I upgraded from 4GB RAM to 8GB, and the performance is now much better.

Before I had to restart my MBP several times a day, with only running Safari - but now is has been running for 2 weeks straight without a restart.

Other than this my Lion is now running very good - with only minor bugs that I can live with until the next SW update arrives.

I would have hoped though that Apple had waited with the release, until they had debugged it more.

br

Per

Hi,

Unfortunatly, acording to Apple my Late 2008 MacBook Pro will not take 8BG RAM upgrade. This along with the other issues associated with Lion such as incompatability with things like my AirDisplay, which I use a lot at my desk clinched my decision to convert to the new Mac mini, and wait for the much talked about release of the next generaation MacBook Pro late thins year/early next.

I have to say the new Mac Mini running with 8GB RAM, a 256GB SSD and 750GB 7,200rpm HDD and the i7 2.7GHz Sandybridge processor make my old MacBook look like a snail. Hats off to Apple for this new geration of Mac mini.

Anthony

Thanks for the advice about Flash Player 11 beta (64-bit.) I am trying that now.

Also... you wrote: Shutdown and clear your System Management Controller (SMC) by holding down the Option-Command-Shift and Power button for 10 seconds then release them. Power up.

According to this document, however: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964

To reset the SMC, we're to press the (left side) Shift-Control-Option keys and the power button at the same time.

Thank you keg55. Did as you suggested. 2007 Macbookpro Core 2 duo 2.4 ghz memory 2GB, running like new again. Thank you.

I was experiencing similar issues with my 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM Macbook Pro 15". I also followed keg55's advice, which worked temporarily. I had to remove the Cache folders every now and again to get it working sweet again - bit of a pain. Regularly ran Disk Utility, rebooted now and again etc. I then upped my RAM from 4GB to 8GB and it's a new machine. I work with some very data-heavy images so need all the oomph I can get - should have upgraded earlier. Anyway, it's also stopped any Lion glitches.

Thanks, I did that on my 2010 13'' MacBook and it's working fine now!!

Possibly shortage of RAM. My similar problem was cured this morning by installing 8GB ram (from 4GB). Since then my system has been trouble free and very slick, something I have not seen since I got the machine in March 2011. Currently my system is using just under 4GB ram and practically nothing is running (Mail, Firefox, OpenOffice, Iterm) and I have no large open files.

Previously, so often my system stayed for a very long time with busy icon. Very often I got a black blind of death. .... not seen it? It is like the Windows blue screen. Very often CPU A ran hot (up to 90C), and activated the fan. Using "Activity Monitor" I could see that free ram was sometimes short. I had *only* 4GB. *Nothing* loaded quickly, and Mail especially took minutes before the busy icon stopped. Vmware took a minimum of 10 minutes to load, and then often crashed. Apple have maybe 300 crash reports for most programs, and the system!

With my previous MBP I got a similar problem after upgrading to Lion. I reckon Lion has memory management issues. Most times it only uses 2 to 3GB, but then memory use suddenly rises to over 4GB.

The slowdowns I had seemed to be when ram ran out and the system used swap (hard disk).

MBP 2.3 core i7 10.7.2

Sorry - I didn't realise there was a page two! I am happy to confirm RAM upgrade does the trick. I too wish I had done it earlier (8-)#

Screensaver Fix

Running Lion on an iMac 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM. It was running extremely slow - user switching too forever.

I deleted my screensaver (Fliqlo) and it seems to have fixed everything.

Go well,

Greg

you are awesome! i did all your recommendations and my macpro is running fast! thanks!🙂

mymac

Still running OK! The VMware Fusion issue though (loading slowly and often locking up for minutes or crashing) was *not* ram related. That issue continued. It was OK under Snow Leopard, so probably a Lion issue. Since the recent VMware 4.1.2 update, the situation is much improved.