Slow macbook pro since Mountain lion

I've did it all. I even restarted the SMC afterwards.

My MBP is unfortunately still slugish.

For example it needs 15 sec to open System Preferences.

I have no problems on early 2008 imac.

A coupld of updates that may (or may not) help.....

First, I upped the MTU to Jumbo in Network Preferences and now Safari runs rather than walks. Thank you to the person who suggested this 🙂

Second, having read your message I timed my System Preferences load time because that was one of the things that I had noticed took ages. It ws taking 31 seconds. I then looked at what processes were using what ratio of CPU time and was horrified to find that the Dashboard was gobbling up large chunks of it.

I killed Dashboard and tried again loading System Preferences - 7 seconds, which is about what it took before. In fact I killed it and loaded again in 4 seconds but of course some of those pages would still be in memory and not need reloading!

Flash Player in Safari is also consuming large chunks of CPU but it was doing taht before I upgraded (there's a known problem with that combination which hopefull Adobe will sort out soon).

Hope this helps.... Ian

Changing my fonts back to the standard number (182, I believe) helped a LOT, and seems to (fingers crossed) have solved my slowdown problems. Thanks a million!

After installing Mountain Lion from the App Store, (which was a smooth 2 hour process), my MBP (late 2010) was crawling slow.

Everything from the App Store, Safari, iTunes, Parallels, Kaspersky was so slow!!!

So this is what I did:

- a few complete shutdowns/startup,

- changed the FINDER preferences to hide the ALL MY FILES item from the Finder Favorites Sidebar, and display my Macbook as the default folder. (in hopes of avoiding constant useless searches and indexing when I opened Finder)

That helped, but wasn't enough, After that resetting PRAM and NVRAM (twice in a row) that did the trick for me.

Now I'm back up to my previous average speed.

Hopefully this will stick, or get better as time goes by.

My Macbook Pro (late 2010); Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4ghz, 750gb 7200rpm HD (200gb free), 8gb ram, Kaspersky Anti-virus, WD Anywhere shadow backup, 3 external displays (2 USB, 1 DVI/HDMI)

Had the same issue. Booted in safe mode (very slowly). Restarted with normal boot. Everything back to pre ML speeds. Have a great day.

Hey I am Having the same problem if you could help me it would be great

macinize, thanks for your post. I was having similar problems of slowdown: 90 seconds or more to boot. Cleaned up fonts and NVRAM (late 2011 macbook pro) and now boot in less than 60 seconds. App startups are faster now too. This is about where I was when new with Lion.

I recently bought a Macbook Pro 15(Non Retina), i7 , 8 GB RAM , 750 GB(5,200 RPM) HDD - Mountain lion 10.8.1, now - 10.8.2

I thought that by having an 8 GB RAM my laptop will be very fast. Dissapointingly, it has been running very slow... too slow .

Takes around 30 seconds to start .Safari 6 even after the update is still very slow . Let alone the internet , I was copying some 12 GB files which took around 14 minutes to get copied on my Mac. Now, I really dont know if it is normal .I am very new to Macbook Pro, since Mountain lion it has been running very slow.I went to the activity monitor everything seems fine,no overuse.I have hardly installed any heavy software for photo or video.

Some claim that mountain lion starts in their computer in 6-7 seconds,some differ by saying it takes longer than usual. I wonder what is wrong .I cannot find out a proper reason for my Macbook running so slow. My sister's Dell inspiron with a 320 GB HDD and a 4 GB RAM starts faster and copies even more faster . Please HELP . Its now very hard for me to understand. A laptop with 750 GB HDD out of which 650 GB is free with 8 GB RAM SHOULD by all means be FAST .It should take seconds to copy . My macbook behaves like an core2duo 2GB configuration.

Some Say its Mountain Lion...

Some Say its the Safari..

by the way i use a PPOE internet connection.

Please help me and guide me to know my system better.I cannot explain my problem to the folks at apple if I myself dont know what is making my mac so slow.ANYONE PLEASE HELP !

Sorry to see that you are dissappointed. Here is some information for you. Not trying to convince you one way or the other, just to set appropriate expectations.

A MacBook Pro with a 5400 rpm hard disk is not ever going boot (from power down to full operation) in less than 30 seconds. The boot process includes several HW startup tests (including a memory test which, BTW, will take longer for 8GB than 4GB).

But there are 2 key pieces of information needed before you can make an accurate comparison on boot time:

1) Systems with solid-state drives will be considerably faster that systems with traditional hard drives (yours has a traditional hard drive, and not the fastest at that).

2) Don't confuse a full boot with waking from sleep. This will happen in a few seconds, even with your system.

File copy is subject to several factors. (BTW, are you copying several 12GB files, or several files that total 12GB?) The amount of memory, size of hard disk and amount of free disk space are not the primary factors in determining speed of a computer unless you are already stressing the memory system (even in this case the overall size of the HD has no impact, its the amount of free space for swap.) Just to help you calibrate your expectations:

1) A USB2 link has a sustained throughput of about 300Mbps (mega-bits per second), which is 83 MBps, even though it can burst up to 480 Mbps. A single 12GB file would take about 144 seconds (about 2 1/2 minutes). This is a best case number impacted by other system timing and it doesn't even take into consideration the speed of the disk access at the device end of the link.

2) Thunderbolt connected drives can be significantly faster, with a theoretical transfer rate of 10Gbps (but due to the encoding on the bus it is 1GBps). You could get your file sent over that link in as little as 12 seconds, but the real bottleneck is the disk at the device end of the bus. Even the fastest SSD is only a few hundred MBps, so you would still take close to a minute to transfer the file. If the device disk is a HD, you would see the transfer taking about 2x as long. (again this is an absolute best case that you would probably never see).

3) Network connected drives are even slower than USB.

4) The copy from your disk to another location on your disk is limited by the read/write access speed on your disk. Slower disk means more time.

5) Multiple smaller files slows all of the above.

Hope this helps with setting appropriate expectations.

After the last update to Mountain Lion, I started seeing a decrease in battery life even though many had reported seeing an improvement. My Macbook pro was getting 4 - 5 hours of usability. So, I decided to downgrade to Lion.

After a full backup, I rebooted into recovery, erased the disk then reinstalled OSX Lion.

Install was easy. Once installed, I immediately did a software upgrade to 10.7.5.

Recovered my documents. Set up emails etc.

Then I verified disk and permissions and repaired as needed.

Booted into safe mode, again verified disk and permissions and repaired as necessary.

Under the same working conditions as yesterday, I now have 8.5 hours of usability.

I have been on battery since 6am this morning and still going strong nearly 6 hours later with battery life at 60%.

I installed the Messages Beta version - works fine.

Sure, I don't have notifications - don't miss them.

ALl in all, the best decision I have made regarding my Macbook Pro.

Thankyou Silvergc for your generous help.

I was copying several files that total 12GB.I also wanted to know If my traditional 750 GB hard Drive's SPEED(5,200 RPM ) is the reason for all speed issues.If the Hard Drive is the reason than I have no problems in my hardware.I will get an SSD later and things will sort out.

What worries me is IF IT IS something else other than that.

I have like Peter stated in the comment above, experinced a significant decrease in battery life when it comes to working on Mountain Lion. I could not work more than 4.5 Hrs.

The people at Apple say my machine has no problem in Hardware.Its the Operating system which is creating problems i.e, mountain lion and is likely to get fixed soon.The problem is

I cannot wait for Mountain Lion to fix it issues as my exams are approaching. I recently tried to instal the Mountain Lion Supplemental update and when I tried to restart my Laptop as I was asked to by apple...it took 15 hrs until my battery dropped to zero and it was unsuccessful.I have my exams coming up and my newly bought Macbook is giving me a really awfull experince, I could never imagine that I would have to bear all this with spending so much money ... a normal average laptop with minimial configuration is fast than my expensive slow machine.

I just want my laptop to give me the SPEED it should.SSD I cannot afford right now. IF an operating system other than M.Lion gives me good working conditions and even if not the fastest speed but better than M.Lion than please suggest me one accordingly.

SO, WILL DOWNGRADING TO OS X LION will make things smoother than Mountain lion ?

Safari and Firefox LAG pretty badly in Mountain Lion . I have heard people experinced fairly good working conditions when working under Lion as compared to Mountain Lion.

Hey everyone I need some help

Just bought 8gb ram and wanted to install it on my 15" MBP

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 2

L2 Cache: 3 MB

Memory: 4 GB

Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

Boot ROM Version: MBP51.007E.B06

SMC Version (system): 1.33f8

Serial Number (system): W88442DH1GK

Hardware UUID: A2749D91-F925-52FD-A8ED-16C29B8DE531

Sudden Motion Sensor:

State: Enabled

Im running on ML and when i tried installing the 8gb ram i get a 3 beeps sound

what can i do ?

Thanks for all the info.

So, it is two weeks now since I downgraded to Lion from Mountain Lion.

My battery life has continued to provide more than 8 hours on a full charge with 4 email accounts pushing / pulling every 15 minutes, wi-fi on, keyboard backlight on, Bluetooth on, internet surfing etc.

Prior to the downgrade, I made a list of all my programs. Then, I downloaded or installed each program from scratch. I only restored files from my external drive, nothing else.

For the last two weeks, my MacBook Pro has exactly the same settings and content as it had with Mountain Lion, only with Lion now installed.

So, if you are considering a way to restore the ability to use your MacBook as it was intended, and not tethered to a power cord, then give serious consideration to a downgrade to Lion until Apple can demonstrate they both recognize and have fixed the mountain lion battery issue.

As far as lag times with Safari, I no longer have the lag associated with Mountain Lion using Safari.

Once you downgrade to Lion, you can download iMessage Beta ( just search for the link to download since Apple removed the link) and also upgrade Safari. You will not regret it.

I personally will wait for the next upgrade to Mountain Lion, then scour the forums for feedback before even considering whether or not to go back to ML.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for your contributions to this post. I had the same issue with a 2011 MacBook Pro 15" i7 and I used several techniques mentione here, and seem to have resolved my speed issues.

• Firstly, I did a thorough clean with Onyx
• Next, I reset the PRAM and NVRAM twice in a row, like alexanderdp
• Lastly, I booted into safe mode, logged on in safemode, then shut down.

After these steps, the next time I logged in normally, MBP was running properly again, at pre-ML 10.8 performance.

In summary, I just wanted to confirm this solution works for some users, such as myself who didn't want to go back to Lion if possible.