OS X Lion - WAY slower than Snow Leopard used to be

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Level 1

4 points

OS X Lion - WAY slower than Snow Leopard used to be

I'm getting so frustrated. First the response is "Your computer is just indexing, give it time and it'll get better."

No. No better. It's been 2 months. My computer is HORRIBLY slow. Right now I'm trying to do simple tasks in photoshop that used to be 10 second things in OS X Snow Leopard but are taking upwards of half an hour to process in this damned operating system.

I've been forced to close all unnecessary applications. Full screen applications? Forget it- the system can't handle them. Seriously though- it shouldn't take a 1 year old computer half an hour to shrink a 300dpi, 24"x36" document to 150dpi. This is just upsetting.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.1), Especially slow when running Photos

Posted on Sep 28, 2011 3:42 PM

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Answer 1

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Sep 28, 2011 3:59 PM in response to J.M. Pelland

I've always disliked the "indexing" explanation. Partly, perhaps, because I've never seen a noticeable performance drop due to indexing following a major system upgrade. If indexing is taking a lot of resources and takes more than a couple hours, there's something wrong.

As to your particular issues, it's hard to say what's going wrong without more information. I was seeing a lot of beachballs and performance issues, especially when using Aperture or Photoshop Elements, until I upgraded my RAM to 8 GB (from 4 GB). You may benefit from that as well.

There are a number of other possibilities, as well as a test you can do to determine difinitively whether you need more RAM, in the second half of Understanding upgrade nightmares*.

* Disclaimer: links to my pages may give me compensation, and should not be taken as endorsement of my services by Apple.

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