My MacBook runs slower on Safe Mode?!

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Level 1

1 points

My MacBook runs slower on Safe Mode?!

So I heard someone talking about this "Safe Mode" and I thought it was an interesting feature in MacBooks and all I have to do was press Shift. I tried that and to my surprise, everything is slower. I tried to swith spaces and the wallpaper renders pixel per pixel on my screen. This never happened before. It's so slow! It has never been this slow before. I was curious if everything was really slower or it's just me so I fired up Geekbench. The results were staggering. 1280 points. A Power Mac G5 is faster than that. Even the Mac mini from 2007 is faster than that! This MacBook SHOULD be 3695! This is really amazing in a bad way. And other than that, I didn't really notice any difference at all from Safe Mode and Normal Mode. Is Safe Mode really designed to run slower than Normal? Because if it should, then why would Safe Mode be created? It's pointless!

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Apr 29, 2012 4:55 AM

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Answer 1

Apr 29, 2012 5:09 AM in response to iAppleseed

You obviously do not understand the purpose of Safe Mode. It's a troubleshooting environment and disables many non-essential features in addition to performing other maintenance functions. Of course things that are graphics intensive will run more slowly because hardware accelerated graphics is disabled. I'd recommend reading the documentation regarding Safe Mode.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1564

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Answer 2

deopsc4

Level 1

2 points

Oct 16, 2013 9:27 AM in response to fjfjfjfjfjfjdksllair

re "You obviously do not understand the purpose of Safe Mode"

Well I understand the purpose of safe mode and there is a massive problem. While trying to clear some plist and cache data to resolve an issue with preview. For some reason preview will only open the same image even after deleting it from my machine...no matter what I am trying to open. Preview will then become unresponsive and hang.

The problem can only be resolved by booting into safe mode then back into normal mode.

Checking activity monitor while booted into safe mode reveals more than 14gig of memory allocated as "wired"(I have 16 gig of memory) after the memory required by the OS is allocated this leaves programs a small portion to run in.

opening the applications window takes 10 seconds in safe mode and that is NOT normal.

Do you have any idea how the wired memory is allocated and how to determine why the core would require 14gig of memory ?

Cheers

Macbook Pro retina 15"

256 gig flash

16 Gig memory

i7 2.3

OSX 10.8.5

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