Mavericks slower than Mountain Lion, what is your experience?

I upgraded to Mavericks at the weekend and it's caused me nothing but hassle. Running basic tasks it is incredibly slow in comparison to previous OS X. I've given it a couple of days but I think i'm going to go back to a previous version at least until Apple come up with a satisfactory fix.

Problems i'm having;

1. Freezing when sleeping or coming back from sleep mode.
2. Freezing for no apparent reason.
3. System overheating (Had no issues with this on previous versions

which Mac model, if I may ask? and how much RAM?

My problems (never freezing) with Mavericks appear to have vanished, but it's with the later versions, dot 2 and dot 3 that are vastly better.

Also, it appears to me that the installation process can vary greatly and I don't know why; it seems that when you initiate it, the installer takes care of the rest but this appears not to be the case.

..and I assume you erase and install, run disk utility making sure Disk is OK, etc.

If Mavericks fixes the heating up issue, that's a big plus. The fans run very loudly for me. One reason I have not installed it is incompatibility of Mavericks with some external drives.

I have an older computer. It's a mid-2010, 15 inch MacBookPro. 2.4GHz, Intel Core i5, 4 GB memory.

Maybe I should just wait for Yosemite?

Ray, I should probably do a clean install too. I have never done that. I have been migrating data since OS 9. iPhoto was messing up my photos. I copied my existing iPhoto library to my external drive.

I don't use iTunes much, I don't use Safari, I don't use iPhoto, I don't have an iPhone or iPad. I use Android for that.

I still have my PhotoShop and MS Office Disks. Dumb question, but since there is one install per computer, would this count as a second install, or if I still have my install key, it will recognize it's the same computer?

I have never used Time Machine, but I would guess my first step would be to do a Time Machine backup and test to see if it works. Maybe use Disk Utility too, to create a bootable disk image? I also always use SuperDuper to make a bootable disk image.

So, what else? This looks pretty comprehensive, putting Mavericks on a USB flash drive, http://macs.about.com/od/Mavericks/ss/How-To-Perform-A-Clean-Install-Of-Os-X-Mav ericks-On-A-Macs-Startup-Drive_2.htm what do you think?

Jasmine;

That method looks good. I also just learned about a good method for creating the bootable USB-drive Installer for Mavericks. Here's the link:

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-create-a-bootable-os-x-mavericks-usb-install-d rive/http://

I would also encourage to say good-bye to any 3rd-party interface enhancers and stick only to whatever OS X installs on the computer. Some people may have great luck with them, but I am getting a picture that they produce more problems and worry than they promise to solve. I have no idea whether you use such things, but just thought I'd add that point to the conversation just in case.

btw, curious point with performance boost we might be missing here: here and there I see RAM upgrades thrown into, yet never heard [in any comment particularly on this thread] if anyone's using SSDs instead of HDD; in many cases such an upgrade could give you much more than additional RAM which you [=> system 🙂] may not even be able to 'allocate' given the peculiarities of your tasks run and apps used daily.

I'm running basic 2.0GHz 13-inch Aluminum, Late 2008 MacBook [http://support.apple.com/kb/sp500] with only 4Gb RAM installed and native HDD replaced with simple entry-level 64Gb SSD (I'm not specifying manufacturer to avoid any sort of advertising here; if your Mac has Serial ATA revision 2.0 (3 Gb/s) bus interface - it doesn't matter which budget SSD you choose here - it all will perform pretty much same, so it's up to your preferences regarding reliability of any particular manufacturer you know/like there on the market), and Mavericks installed from scratch and upgraded to 10.9.4 few days ago.

It runs very smoothly as for the Mac's age, and if you're not overloading Safari with multiple tabs and lots of content - you could even run a Virtual Machine on it (Windows 8.1 64bit with 1Gb RAM allocated to it)… and this is my setup which works stable. I never turned off any Spotlight indexing or browser extensions, so I'm yet to find out if I could even further improve performance here. I'm not going to deny it gets hot with fan running loud at such usage, but it's pretty much expected considering 'old platform setup'. If you don't use VM - it just runs great.

If I were to read this thread before considering upgrading my old notebook - I'd be really scared and probably still use previously installed 10.6.8

I realize I'm replying to an old thread. However, like many others I too am still checking the pulse of the ongoing saga. To answer the question even as we've already got up to 10.9.4 I'd have to say the short answer is "NO".

The long answer:

If you have more than one mac and the machine is capable of more than 8 gigs of RAM, I would still say "Maybe" but only if you have at least one fully updated clone backup.

Making the latest upgrade "Free" was the worst thing for end users. If they charged even 1 dollar, that might have given enough people a reason to pause before making a snap decision that caused so many headaches.

I run several Mac labs and have multiple personal machines. I make weekly and monthly versioned clones of my personal machines. I discovered as others have that the newest models with fresh installs work fine. A machine that has been carrying over data since 10.2.8 is bound to introduce a few hours of trouble shooting for speed delays among the issues that even newly updated Apple apps have experienced with the new OS.

Here is the deal: Everyone wants the new features and can't wait to upgrade. The last few upgrades lulled us into a false sense of security since they have gotten better and faster at fixing new OS issues. The latest iterations stripping out and leaving behind apps that ran on old code and braking a few current apps in the process. If you are dependent on one machine and do maintenance on that machine from another partition, hold off. I've run triple and quad boot environments successfully until they foisted that recovery partition as a permanent fixture. Prosoft Drive Genius was good at getting rid of the partition and making it possible to get the Windows 7 working for bootcamp. However, use of the Mac Utility app for cloning recovery is lost once you move to 10.7 and the partition work gets more picky in 10.9 where 10.7 and 10.8 was more tolerant of having the partition removed, but I digress.

The Apple Remote Desktop suffered the most in performance lost to the new OS when RAM is limited, even when extensive "tinkering" is done to prevent the OS from sleeping an app and having memory cleaner running because the RAM doubling feature isn't magic and there is a performance cost to machines that don't run 7200rpm or not fitted with NANDRam to smooth out the peak demands.

The bottom line is the few features gained have got to be really worth it and I have to say that the only feature motivating the upgrade of an older machine is the cloud keychain since you need only one mac to have it in order to get it to sync all your mobile devices.

The new iPhoto and iMovie that force you to be on Mavericks is not an improvement as it is also demanding more power while offering a few new tricks that are also not really worth the extra work and learning curve. Every new project I've done with iMovie, I've discovered that it is less useful and disrupts the workflow that I was able to recreate the project in 9.09 and publish it faster. The activity monitor for the version 10 is weak at best. I run a triple boot 10.8.5 / 10.9.4 / Win7Pro and find that the Mt. Lion side is just more streamlined in performance and efficient use of resources where Mavericks seams to be following the Windows 8 path.

Don't get me wrong, I like the new candy in Mavericks and have no issues with it running on an 11 inch air with only 4 gigs of Ram but running memory clean in auto clean mode still improves its performance. It just seems that the continuation of what Intel giveth (insert OS Name Here) taketh away. I do like the newest and more human Voices for text to speech and the voice to text improvements.

Its really not worth losing all the performance for an older machine that can't be economically upgraded for faster drives and more RAM at any price. Aperture and Photoshop already push the RAM limits of the chart on an 8Ggig MBP. Don't even get me started on the dropping of Aperture announcement.

I hope I've helped you make the decision to just get a newer machine easier because the time you'll devote to restore lost performance to an old machine running new software will still leaving you disappointed even if you managed to get back most of what you lost.

Good Luck

Mavricks seemed to be running fin until the latest update for me everything started to slow down so much I wanted to throw then **** MacBook pro to the ground. I know there is the new Yosemite but I honetsly think Yosemite killed the look of what Apple was before. I'm going back to mountain lion and I'll come back with how the laptop is functioning. I really need to use my laptop for school but instead I have to use this iPad mini. what the **** is Apple doing now? They're ruining the design and the core concept of the company.