Mac slow after installing Maverick

I appreciate your more calm approach. :-)

Yes running Mavericks on an older system would probably not serve you well ;-) I have an older classic MacBook (white plastic ... ewwww) and I love that old machine. Upgraded it to the 4GB max and put a 350 GB hard disk in there to replace the original 120 GB disk but I don't think that system is capable of running Mavericks, has a 32 bit processor ....

But my current machine is:

• 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5
• Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz
• 4GB 1600MHz memory
• 500GB 5400-rpm hard drive¹
• Intel HD Graphics 4000
• Built-in battery (7 hours)²

And I can't use it for work any longer ... It's only useful for doing things at home that aren't time critical.

I had considered upgrading my iMac but since it's a couple years old now I'm reasonably sure the performance will be even worse on that machine.

I know Apple can't be everything to everyone, I worked there for 3 years as a contractor and one thing I took away from that is that they are very light on QA. There are 5 software developers or more per QA person. They basically dog-food their apps and products, which is great ... but still, I'm seeing a lot of great innovation in parallel with a lot of issues that absolutely should not have gotten out the door ...

A good set of regression testing on older hardware for Mavericks would have flushed out a lot of issues. Mac users tend to hold on to their systems for an average of 4 years or longer. And although innovation cannot be hindered to satisfy people running older hardware, it also should not push the envelope so hard that it stifles new hardware ... just my opinion

Could this be the solution ?

I too have a MBP on Marvericks that is way too slow since the upgrade. I looked everywhere, tried a few things, with no results, and suddenly, the system overload on the CUP’s went from 80-90% to 0,5-2% at idle !! And the MBP back to Wrap Speed after a few seconds !

What I did? Not much. I am even wondering if this was the solution or if it was a coincidence. I have read that the culprit was the « kernel_task » that was kicking in to cool the CPU’s, thus, slowing down the machine. In last resort, I decided to remove the protective skin on my keyboard (which was surprisingly hot) and put the MBP on a table support with twin fans powered by USB. Within a few seconds, the system overload drop to a very, very low level, and my MBP was back to full speed. And the kernel_task now stays below 5%.

Is this too simple to be the solution? Maybe. But it's certainly worth a try. In other words : keep it cool! And if you use your MBP lid down, open it up. And give your MBP a little air underneath if you don’t have cooling fans.

I hope that helps, cause I know the frustration.

thewesternfront wrote:

The point is that I cut to the chase .... nobody who is having these performance issues is actually getting their problem solved ...

Everyone who starts a new Discussion with specific information gets their specific problems addressed. If you already did that then please post a link to yours. No one with the ability and motivation to help you will be able to do that without specific information. Despite several requests from knowledgeable others, you have failed to provide it.

Your inaction suggests that that your only purpose here is to complain. In that case, declare victory and move on.

Whatever ... My purpose is to point out the fact that chasing silly rabbits won't fix the performance problems that are not a by-product of malware or disk space or all the other time consuming troubleshooting that turns up the same result ... as many many many have said "still having the same issues" .... becuase those things will only consume time and frustrate the person with the issue. It's a performance problem with the OS itself not the user, his machine or his apps.... simple deduction ... machine is in a state of escellent performance .. I upgrade to Mavericks ... now I ahve "a $2,300 paperweight" as one user put it. All of those features and eye-candy come at the cost of performance .... it's up to the user to browse these forums and decide whether it is worth the risk to upgrade. I can definitely say, as an early disappointed adopter, it's not worth it. ... WAIT ... see if Apple patches the OS, and then consider it ... otherwise you'll spend HOURS aor even DAYS running disk utilities, adding and removing apps, re-installing your OS several times, doing backups, posting your machines profile for the 10th time and still you'll be sitting on the same problem......

Declare Victory? that's nonsense .....

I can't find an issue with Mavericks yet. Running fine on my five Macs. Must be something wrong with a handful of peoples installs. Conflicting third party software or junk ware maybe. If anyone has bricked theirs then most likely hardware or corrupted by 'silly rabbits'. They always propose a danger to OSX upgrades.

Cheers

Pete

and by "a handful of people" you must mean the several thousands who have posted on just about every Mac forum out there. And those same people whose alleged 3'rd party crapware never seemed to affect their Mountain Lion installations. Or maybe they all just have "corrupter hardware" that seemed to also function perfectly on Mountain Lion ... LOL ... so as sooooon as people instlled Mavericks they all ran out of disk space, had their file systems corrupted, their hardware failed, and they instantly went out on the internet to download as many 3'rd party crap ware apps as possible and THAT is the real reason Mavericks is slow as **** ..... Well I'm glad we debugged that problem. Now I can sleep at nights

Yes you are right, your time is best spent complaining at people who can't fix your issues (because you won't provide any info).

Blame Apple, keep adding no useful information to your 12 posts. Add some more anecdotal evidence, more time will pass & your Mac will still be hosed.

Great job it's working out well for you so far.

Well the big difference between my HOSED Mac and everyone else's is that I didn't spend all my time chasing the wrong problem and trying to fix things that never were broken ... in the end we're still all in the same boat except I didn't spend hours frustraating myself and doing mindless backups, OS reinstalls, blah blah ... I tried a handful of reasonable tihngs and made my determination. I'm jsut trying to save people time and frustration .... so boo my opinion but so far nobody has had their issues fixed. I jsut saved time coming to that conclusion :-)

I guess this indeed is where I "declare victory" .... Good luck !!! :-)

Victory? You didn't do anything except rant, give no links to your paranoid 'issues' and mention silly rabbits, which some of us will remember you dearly for.

Good luck in whatever it is you are trying to achieve and congratulations on the victory.

Pete

For the sake of those people who are coming to this thread for answers I must say that the info Drew Reece put on here in one of her earlier posts was directly responsible for helping me to solve the problems I was having with Mavericks on both my MacbookPro and my iMac. My MacbookPro was reduced to a doorstop with me not being able to login for up to 3 hours. After taking Drew's advice I logged in using safe mode and updated all my software via App Store (see my earlier posts). Later I then disabled Legacy FileVault on my homedrive. These actions together have completely resolved all of my problems with Mavericks. I have been running with no issues for a week! So it is simply not true to say: "nobody who is having these performance issues is actually getting their problem solved" ... I am one of those people and my problems are solved. 🙂

Having said that however it's pretty obvious that there are some significant issues for some people when upgrading an existing OS X install to Mavericks. People who do a clean install are much less likely to have any problems. If you are one of those who, like me, has experienced these issues do read carefully through this thread. If your problems started at the point in time that you upgraded using Mavericks then software compatibility issues with Mavericks is the most likely cause and there are fixes out there! Of course all of us would have prefered it if Apple had pre-empted these issues by doing more QA on upgrading older software however I suspect Mavericks is a BIG step forward in terms of OS architecture and as such Apple may have chosen inovation ahead of backwards compatibility. Some may be suffering now with upgrade issues but in the long term we are all likely to end up with a better OS. I certainly am very happy with what I now have. It's a big step up from Snow Leopard and it was free! 😀

I am suffering severe slowdowns on my Mid 2011 21.5 iMac with 1tb Drive and 4gigs RAM.

This happened only after the Mavericks upgrade.

Mavericks IS NOT slower. On my mide 2008 MacBook Pro, Mavericks is actually faster than Mountain Lion was (no SSD in either the iMac or the MacBook Pro). It's also blazing fast on my mid-2013 11" MacBook Air.

I have heard issues with other 21.5" Mid 2011 iMacs (of various configurations).

Only solid fix I've heard is to back up documents, wipe completely and start from scratch.

If anybody else has a fix, I'm happy to hear it before I nuke it.

Thank you!

thewesternfront wrote:

I appreciate your more calm approach. :-)

Yes running Mavericks on an older system would probably not serve you well ;-) I have an older classic MacBook (white plastic ... ewwww) and I love that old machine. Upgraded it to the 4GB max and put a 350 GB hard disk in there to replace the original 120 GB disk but I don't think that system is capable of running Mavericks, has a 32 bit processor ....

But my current machine is:

• 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5
• Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz
• 4GB 1600MHz memory
• 500GB 5400-rpm hard drive¹
• Intel HD Graphics 4000
• Built-in battery (7 hours)²

And I can't use it for work any longer ... It's only useful for doing things at home that aren't time critical.

I had considered upgrading my iMac but since it's a couple years old now I'm reasonably sure the performance will be even worse on that machine.

I know Apple can't be everything to everyone, I worked there for 3 years as a contractor and one thing I took away from that is that they are very light on QA. There are 5 software developers or more per QA person. They basically dog-food their apps and products, which is great ... but still, I'm seeing a lot of great innovation in parallel with a lot of issues that absolutely should not have gotten out the door ...

A good set of regression testing on older hardware for Mavericks would have flushed out a lot of issues. Mac users tend to hold on to their systems for an average of 4 years or longer. And although innovation cannot be hindered to satisfy people running older hardware, it also should not push the envelope so hard that it stifles new hardware ... just my opinion

The only way you'd have a 32bit is if you purchased in 2006. They went 64bit across the board with the Core 2 Duo.

As I stated earlier, this is not an old Hardware thing as much as it is a specific hardware thing. The mid 2011 iMacs (21.5") seem to have some weird glitch with Mavericks. Mine is horridly slow, and again, my 2008 MacBook Pro cruises along at incredibly speeds with Mavericks. It's noticibly faster than it was with Mountain Lion.

Also, I work with a ton of older Macs in my job and they all have been upgraded and run just fine with Mavericks. And while any large organization will have some QA slipups now and then, I see far fewer issues out of Apple than I do with things from Microsoft or other hardware vendors.

Apple has even said that pretty much any machine built after 2007 will run Mavericks without issue - and I'm running over 100 2009 MacBooks at my site with Mavericks and without ANY issues.

Message was edited by: micahchaplin

The usual process of trouble shooting would apply…

See if you can isolate the issues to hardware or software (it seems likly it's software, but new OS's may bring out unknown hardware issues). Then try narrowing down by removing or disabling items etc.

If you have multiple backups & can afford the time to reinstall apps & setup, I'd consider the nuke option, grab an EtreCheck report to see what state it looks like first. I'd also save a System Profile report too, so I have a list of Apps for reference when reinstalling.

I feel that too many Migration Assistant/ upgrade installs can bring over too much out of date software.

Instead of this continual thread jacking by you and other users, could you post your own new post with your issues so users can help you in a dedicated thread.

Also, Please download, install and run Etrecheck.

Etrecheck is a small, unobstrusive app that compiles a snapshot of your entire Mac hardware and installed software.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Copy/paste and post its report in a brand new post/thread so that we have a complete profile of your Mac's hardware and installed software. Then, all of us experienced users can begin to help with your Mac issues with OS X Mavericks.

Thank You.