IMac 27" i7 is slower than my 3 year old PC!

Had a new 27" iMac for a few weeks its performance running 10.7 is dreadful, it also runs very hot even though the CPUs never hit 25% and it has stacks of ram. I have tried the obvious fixes. It runs Ubuntu 9 like lightning.
Are any other new iMac owners experiencing rubbish performance?

RRFS,
Some caches help, others do not. System cache is actually there to speed your system. Browser cache is too, but is more easily corrupted.
Modifying system caches can actually slow you down, if you aren't backed up, and misdiagnose what actually is happening.
As for anti-virus, I agree some are really a pain. Sophos and ClamAV are the least intrusive. You do have to be wary, as the Flashback malware behaves almost like a virus, though some would quibble with that:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3261
igsz,
The fact Ubuntu runs well, sounds like you have a a problem with some installed software that either is too old, or shouldn't be installed on your machine. As I've indicated to RRFS, backing up your data should be your first priority:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-1992
Then we can try to isolate what is going on. Directory issues, old drivers, a hard disk too full, logfiles not allowed to be cleaned can actually cause problems. The CPU performance indicators are usually not reliable, so I wouldn't go based on them or the fans. If the system starts shutting down on its own without telling to do so through Energy Saver there could be a hardware problem that doesn't affect Ubuntu. Maybe a piece of software addressing the GPU doesn't know what it is doing, or you have some bad or out of spec or poorly seated RAM. Until we know you are backed up, it could be anything, including even a dying hard drive. Hard drives can die at anytime without warning. And while not often happening on brand new Macs, it is not an impossibility.

Similar Messages

New Mac Mini slower than my 4 years old iMac

My Intel iMac (20" display) four years old is out of order (I think the Power Supply was gone), and I bought the new entry level Mac Mini.
When I started using it I noticed that it's much slower in several tasks than my old iMac (when restarting, when opening applications, when working with an app with another appl in the background, etc. etc.). I was concerned about this, but then I asked some friends that have Mac minis and they said that it's normal.
Why? Why a computer with a new i5 Intel processor can be slower than a four years old iMac Core 2 Duo? Is it because of the slow drive (5200 rpm)? Or what is the explanation? If this is normal for the mini, I'll try to fix my old iMac as soon as possible.

Don't downgrade to Lion. For what it's worth, my experience with Lion and Mountain Lion has been almost the exact opposite than what CaptH reported: I find ML to be much faster and more reliable, both on my late-2012 Mini and my mid-2007 iMac.
Your perceived speed issues are almost certainly a result of the slower-spinning hard drive in the Mini as Shootist007 pointed out earlier. Go ahead and disable Spotlight if you want to, but once the indexing is complete (which can take a few hours – or even a few days if you have a lot of data) it shouldn't be a problem unless you are continually connecting different large external drives.
Get the latest Combo Updater and install that. If you have some minor OS issue, that should solve it. Do a normal Software Update / check the Mac App Store for updates after you install the Combo Updater. Get it here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1640
If you continue to be bugged by the slower speed, see if your local Apple Store will allow you to exchange it and a little extra money for an equivalent model with a Fusion Drive. Or go to Other World Computing and purchase their kit to add a second drive, and use it to add an SSD in the second drive bay:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DIYIMM11D2/
http://eshop.macsales.com/search/OWC.INSTANT.481.2
Also, RAM is super-duper-uber-cheap right now. If your Mini has only the stock 4gb of RAM, you might be pleasantly surprised by the improved performance by doubling that. I have 16gb in my Mini, it cost me well less than a hundred bucks, and it makes everything better including graphics performance. But if you don't do something to work around that slow 5400rpm hard drive, it will always be the bottleneck in your system.

New Z710 Win 8.1 is slower than my 8-year-old AMD!!!!

Hi...
I got my brand-new Z710 a week ako. I haven't finished setting it up yet & I've already got weird problems... My AMD PC, which is running win 7 pro (64b) boots to the login screen 2x as fast as the Z710 - no lie - both units side by side. That simply shouldn't be. I wasted my money on the z710 if this is the speed it runs at with an i7 & 8G Ram. I understand that I've got to get used to W8.1, but regardless... I got an error 0xc000021a yesterday, the wireless link decides whenever it wants to connect... I've done a little searching & there are a number of articles that talk about taking out the "Intel-Dynamic-Platform-Thermal-Framework" being at fault & to take it out - except I can't find it. I called Lenovo support & they seemed fixated on my wireless & trying to blame my router when the z710 is the only one having connectivity troubles. Going hardwire doesn't make it any faster.
I don't recall having this much trouble with a new laptop out of the box. Not sure if anyone has any ideas or thoughts on this? I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to do next.
Any feedback appreciated!
Thanks,
RR.

Hi…
Hopefully this message goes through. Apparently, my Lenovo community login user name is suddenly not valid anymore. I’ve been on a number of forums over the years & I gotta say this one is one of the tougher ones to use.
I don’t have traditional BIOS in this machine - it’s that “UEFI”. I went through it & there’s really not much in there. It took a while to figure out how to get in - can’t imagine how fun updating it would be if that were possible.
All the windows updates ran, updates for the video went through… don’t have any other peripherals attached yet & hadn’t started loading any programs yet because of the trouble.
Sine my initial post, I’ve been staying off wifi, got my programs loaded & getting far less crashes. That said: IE just crashed this morning just trying to open it.
At work, I deal with process control computers & servers - have to deal lots with I.T. & their contractors & ya, they give us new & recycled machines all the time - built from images that aren’t always up to date, so - video drivers 6 months old, etc. but for a brand new OEM machine, this thing should be a lot more solid & certainly quicker than the old AMD.
I’ve done some other reading/investigating… another popular theory is to create a new admin account & blow away the original. Not sure how that works, maybe I’ll try it… I did that once on my W7 o/s I it created more trouble than it solved.
Very frustrating to get a new machine to have it not work right & can’t even get the manufacturer to help you. On the Lenovo site there appears to be some software diagnostic tools available - maybe one of those could help…
Thanks for the reply… the only one I got in a week or so of posting. I had given up. more so now that my account seems to suddenly be invalid.
RR.

Slow Macbook pro, ~1 year old; Really HUGE Page Ins and Page Outs size, think 400 GB In vs 100 GB Out

Hi everyone, I have a macbook pro and it's so slow. After scouring the internet a lot, and CCleaning my computer 359802 times and using Onyx, I finally realized why it's so s low.....my Page Ins and Page Outs are so big. I have attached a screenshot that illustrates this.
I am not sure how my computer ballooned to this size, but it makes sense why it's like a turtle and is slower than my 4 year old Sony.
Can someone help me?? I am not sure what processes to get rid of and I feel like Google Chrome is taking up huge amounts of my Ram. I mean yeah I open Google Chrome and run like 8 tabs and have Word and iTunes open, but my 4 years old Sony could run faster than this and I used to open like 12+ tabs on Chrome while running Word, Excel, Powerpoint, iTunes, and VLC on my Sony. Which was nowhere near as powerful as this computer. Supposedly.
My computer Specs are:
2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM
Intel HD Graphics 384 MB
Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4
I would really appreciate any advice to get this down to normal.....since I hear most ppl have page ins and page outs in the MB or even KB. Right now I'm running Google Chrome, Word, Ppowerpoint, iTunes, and Adobe PDF Reader. I don't think this should be too unreasonable of work load.
Thank you

The problem is not that your page ins are big, as that value resets when you reboot the system. However, your page outs are are almost 25% of your page ins, which means you can use more memory for the applications you run. A page out is done when memory is full, and the system needs to add something else to memory, so it writes some memory to the hard drive to make room. The guideline to add more memory is 10% to 15% page outs greater than page in's, and yours are more than that.
Your MacBook Pro can handle up to 16GB of memory. You might want to consider upgrading to 8GB, which would double what you have today. OWC and Crucial are two sources for quality memory. $42 for 8GB from Crucial, and you can usually find a % off coupon on retailmenot.com.

My four year old iMac is running much slower than when it was new. Any suggestions on cleaning out the cob webs?

My four year old iMac is running much slower than when it was new. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do to "clean it up" and get it running like it used to?

What year, screen size, CPU speed and amount of RAM installed?
To find out info about your system,
Click on the Apple symbol in the upper left of the OS X main menu bar. A drop down menu appears.
Click About this Mac. A smaller popup window appears. This gives you basic info like what version of OS X your iMac is running, the speed of your iMac's CPU and how much RAM is installed.
Click on the button that says More Info. A larger window appears giving you a complete overview of your iMac's hardware specs.
Highlight all of this info and copy/paste all of this into another reply to this post, editing out your iMac's serial number before actually posting the reply.
This will tell us everything about your iMac so we may begin to help with your iMac issues.
How full is your Mac's hard drive?
Locate your iMac's hard drive icon on the OS X desktop. Click the icon once, then use the keyboard key combination Command-I. This will give you additonal info about your iMac's internal hard drive.
Post this info in your reply here, also.
Here are some general tips to keep your Mac's hard drive trim and slim as possible
You should never, EVER let a conputer hard drive get completely full, EVER!
With Macs and OS X, you shouldn't let the hard drive get below 15 GBs or less of free data space.
If it does, it's time for some hard drive housecleaning.
Follow some of my tips for cleaning out, deleting and archiving data from your Mac's internal hard drive.
Have you emptied your Mac's Trash icon in the Dock?
If you use iPhoto, iPhoto has its own trash that needs to be emptied, also.
If you store images in other locations other than iPhoto, then you will have to weed through these to determine what to archive and what to delete.
If you use Apple Mail app, Apple Mail also has its own trash area that needs to be emptied, too!
Delete any old or no longer needed emails and/or archive to disc, flash drives or external hard drive, older emails you want to save.
Look through your other Mailboxes and other Mail categories to see If there is other mail you can archive and/or delete.
STAY AWAY FROM DELETING ANY FILES FROM OS X SYSTEM FOLDER!
Look through your Documents folder and delete any type of old useless type files like "Read Me" type files.
Again, archive to disc, flash drives, ext. hard drives or delete any old documents you no longer use or immediately need.
Look in your Applications folder, if you have applications you haven't used in a long time, if the app doesn't have a dedicated uninstaller, then you can simply drag it into the OS X Trash icon. IF the application has an uninstaller app, then use it to completely delete the app from your Mac.
To find other large files, download an app called Omni Disk Sweeper.
Download an app called OnyX for your version of OS X.
When you install and launch it, let it do its initial automatic tests, then go to the cleaning and maintenance tabs and run the maintenance tabs that let OnyX clean out all web browser cache files, web browser histories, system cache files, delete old error log files.
Typically, iTunes and iPhoto libraries are the biggest users of HD space.
move these files/data off of your internal drive to the external hard drive and deleted off of the internal hard drive.
If you have any other large folders of personal data or projects, these should be archived or moved, also, to the optical discs, flash drives or external hard drive and then either archived to disc and/or deleted off your internal hard drive.
Good Luck!

Brand new 2012 fully loaded iMac is slower then my two year old iMac when using Final Cut.

Just got a new 2012 iMac with 32GB RAM 3.4 Ghz and 3TB Fusion Drive and 2GB Graphics card.
Now Final Cut runs even slower than it does on my old, lesser iMac. What gives?
How Do I optimize the speed in which the video files are played?
I'm using Final Cut 7.
Files are all 1080 Pro Res.
All files are running off of my desktop (locally).
I press play and it is delayed a second before playing on the timeline.
I thought this fully loaded machine was to help me edit faster.
Is the Fusion Drive doing something funny with the file access that causes a delay in playback?
The problem is, the same issue happened when I put the files on an external FW800 G-Drive.
Any advice would be awesome.
Thanks Community!
-Tedshots

are you sure all your files...render files...scratch disk, etc were all pointed to the FW800 drive?
are you trying to play the exact same files in the same manner and see the new imac slower or does it just "seem" slower. You could, for instance, be attempting to play a more compressed file on the new iMac or a higher resolutidon compressed file....we don't know any of that. Apple to Apples, as it were, the new machine will obviously outperform the other one and there are too many variables you haven't covered to be able to draw any real conclusions....tell us more about the specific kinds of files, timeline resolution, video res on both machines and in what way the new one is slower....

HT1758 my Mac is running slow it is 3 years old

Why is my Mac running so slow lately. It is 3 years old and lately is takes long for programs to load.

Things You Can Do To Resolve Slow Downs
If your computer seems to be running slower here are some things you can do:
Start with visits to: OS X Maintenance - MacAttorney;
                                  The X Lab: The X-FAQs;
                                  The Safe Mac » Mac Performance Guide;
                                  The Safe Mac » The myth of the dirty Mac;
                                  Mac maintenance Quick Assist.
Boot into Safe Mode then repair your hard drive and permissions:
Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions Pre-Lion/Mountain Lion
Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
Repair the Hard Drive - Lion/Mountain Lion
Boot from your Lion Recovery HD. When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported, then click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu. Select Restart from the Apple menu.
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
Restart your computer normally and see if this has helped any. Next do some maintenance:
Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For situations Disk Utility cannot handle the best third-party utility is Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts was significantly reduced since Tiger. These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard or Lion and should not be installed.
OS X automatically defragments files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems. For more about malware see Macintosh Virus Guide.
I would also recommend downloading a utility such as TinkerTool System, OnyX 2.4.3, or Cocktail 5.1.1 that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old log files and archives, clearing caches, etc.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the command line. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard. AppleJack 1.6 is compatible with Snow Leopard. There is no confirmation that this version also works with Lion.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
     1. Carbon Copy Cloner
     2. Data Backup
     3. Deja Vu
     4. SuperDuper!
     5. SyncTwoFolders
     6. Synk Pro
     7. Synk Standard
     8. Tri-Backup
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Referenced software can be found at CNet Downloads or MacUpdate.
Additional Hints
Be sure you have an adequate amount of RAM installed for the number of applications you run concurrently. Be sure you leave a minimum of 10% of the hard drive's capacity as free space.
Add more RAM. If your computer has less than 2 GBs of RAM and you are using OS X Leopard or later, then you can do with more RAM. Snow Leopard and Lion work much better with 4 GBs of RAM than their system minimums. The more concurrent applications you tend to use the more RAM you should have.
Always maintain at least 15 GBs or 10% of your hard drive's capacity as free space, whichever is greater. OS X is frequently accessing your hard drive, so providing adequate free space will keep things from slowing down.
Check for applications that may be hogging the CPU:
Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder. Select All Processes from the Processes dropdown menu. Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order. If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time, then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar. Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process. See if that helps. Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.
Often this problem occurs because of a corrupted cache or preferences file or an attempt to write to a corrupted log file.

Why is my new MacBook louder than my 5-year-old iBook?

New 2.4ghz MacBook aluminum owner here. There a very low hum coming from my new MacBook, and it is always there. I don't know if it is the hard drive or the fan, but is is quite obvious in a quiet room.
I compared it to my 2003 plastic iBook, and the iBook is SILENT compared to the new MacBook.
I checked the iStat Pro stats, and the fan is around 2000rpm and the temps are normal.
Anyone else notice this? I love the new machine, but this noise is slightly disappointing, especially compared to a 5-year-old iBook.
Thanks!

Douglas McLaughlin wrote:
Heat has been an issue with Macs since the first Intel chips in 2006.
That doesn't explain why G5 (PowerPC) towers had to have liquid cooling to keep the temperatures down and the Mac Pro towers (even with eight cores) are okay with just fans... I think you've made a VERY broad, generalized statement that can't be supported.
A G3 iBook is quite different than a G5 tower. The iBook was silent and would run 5.5 hours on a single battery. Of course, it was a nightmare to change the hard drive. The video wasn't shared with the CPU like the Macbook. Unfortunately, said G3 video card also wasn't affixed very well to the logic board either.
My Macbook doesn't quite have the same battery life, sounds like it has a turbocharger when doing video or heavy CPU, and will literally burn my left leg if I set it directly on my lap. There is a reason why Apple stopped selling "laptops" when the Macbooks came out.

After installing Lion, my iMac (early 2009) is slower than before

I installed OSX Lion and I noticed a severe drop in performances of my iMac 24" (early 2009), particularly when opening and closing applications.
Is there something to do to speed-up the iMac?

same issues and not sure how else to speed up my system. Anyone? Please help! It's killing me.

Help! Ran EtreCheck on Macbook Pro. Very slow and only 2 years old.

I want to start out by saying I take very good care of my computer, its my baby . But for some reason over the last 6 months it has gotten extremely slow. I have no idea what is causing this. Something that sparks my attention is that I have 8 gigs of RAM and after I start up my computer I'm left with only about 30 megabytes of free RAM right off the bat.
I do want to point out that I am running the second developer preview of Yosemite as I am testing our software on it. I have had no further problems with the developer OSX that I had with Mavericks. The problems came about way before this.
Any help would be appreciated!
Here are screenshots of the EtreCheck report:

You mistreated your baby by installing the useless Sophos garbage.
Uninstall it.
I do want to point out that I am running the second developer preview of Yosemite as I am testing our software on it. I have had no further problems with the developer OSX that I had with Mavericks.
Apparently you did not read the nondisclosure agreement that you agreed to, and have now violated.

W510 is one day old and sucks more than my 3 year old computer

My Thinkpad W510 just arrived yesterday. Everything on it is great (it doesn't really suck as much as my title makes it seem) except for 2 very annoying things (three if you count one USB outlet not being recognized). From the very first startup, whenever I click on the start menu to bring up the list, it will stay open from anywhere to 1-2 seconds to 5-6 seconds before exiting to the desktop without me doing anything to cause it to do this... it happens EVERY time and it is extremely frustrating because I don't even have enough time to launch a program.
Secondly I went to open the Bluetooth program so that I could connect my phone to it and (SURPRISE!) whenever I was lucky enough to have the 5 - 6 seconds before the start menu closed automatically, I would click the Bluetooth program and NOTHING HAPPENS... Maybe I just don't know that the program file is there for decoration while there's some other way that you initiate your Bluetooth. In that case then the joke is on me... But the startup thing is still extremely annoying, and I know that isn't my misunderstanding of anything.
Can anyone help me out with this? Apparently Lenovo's technical support cannot since I called (since I got the extended 3 year warranty then I thought I might as well put it to use within the first 24 hours of owning the computer) and I had to really struggle to understand their techie's broken English, he obviously wasn't familiar with my computer's programming because when he told me to do certain things to get to a certain screen, nothing went the way he said it would. After about 10 minutes of him attempting to help me, he told me to intentionally prevent my computer from starting up properly, made it show me a ton of error screens, and then promptly ended the conversation, leaving me there to reboot and repair the errors...
Through the grapevine I've heard that Lenovo's computers are supposed to be some of the best on the market but this is my second computer with them (I wasn't very impressed with the first one) and I am just becoming less and less favorable of Lenovo as each problem occurs... Very frustrating. Could anyone help me with any of these problems?

Lenovo support (for me in Canada at least) is based in Atlanta, so I'm surprised you found a tech with bad English...
Your problems sound like windows problems, not hardware problems -- are you running XP or Windows7? If you google based on your OS, there are threads to be found on slowing down the start menu behaviors.

Why is my macbook so slow? its 5 years old and it takes a full minute to open and close simple windows

my macbook is only 5 years old. i do a lot of stuff on it but it should be able to handle it. it takes forever to do any task usually and the fan is constantly going like crazy. is this just a case of 'you need to upgrade your laptop'?

Model Name:          MacBook
Model Identifier:          MacBook2,1
Processor Name:          Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed:          2.16 GHz
Number Of Processors:          1
Total Number Of Cores:          2
L2 Cache:          4 MB
Memory:          2 GB
Bus Speed:          667 MHz
Boot ROM Version:          MB21.00A5.B07
SMC Version (system):          1.17f0
Serial Number (system):          W87258NAYA3
Hardware UUID:          00000000-0000-1000-8000-0019E33F8E1B
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State:          Enabled
this is all my hard ware info

After Effects Render SLOW - Slower than my old PC

I am using a new 1 month old 20" iMac, 2.0Ghz with 4gb DDR2 RAM, running OS X Leopard. Adobe After Effects CS3 is rendering really slow, and I mean like the same as my PC. Also the same with Premiere Pro, it renders really slow and I have tried different formats too, in premiere pro it took 2 hours to render a 5 minute video (saved to .mp4 640x480 pixels, end size was 20mb). This is wayyy to slow.
I compared my Mac with my old PC running Windows XP, it is pentium 4, 3.2Ghz with Hyper threading technonlogy and 1.5 GB DDR Ram. I tested rendering andrew kramers 3d room tutorial, I downloaded the project file. I only chose to render some of it and the old PC was FASTER than the Mac by around 15-20%. BUT, the mac was ONLY using 6% of the 3gb (it only recognises 3 gig not 4 but I dont mind that too much) and the PC was using 60-70% of the 1.5GB (thats using more RAM than the mac) So why can't I get the Mac to use more RAM when rendering, and why is it slower??? It is faster at EVERYTHING else, well the ram preview is about the same.
How can I get my mac to use more of the RAM and why is it rendering and previewing the same if not SLOWER than my 5 year old PC?
Any help would be awesome, thanks
- Dillon

RAM allocation is dynamic, you cannot enforce anything on that end. AE takes what it needs and no more. I would think that your issue has to do with the graphics card/ chipset, so my first suggestion would be to make sure you have updated your AE to the 8.0.2 patch. Secondly, run a software update for your Mac. If neither of this applies and brings any betterment, disable the AE_OpenGL.plugin. Simply delete it or move it outside the AE directory. Most certainly your issues hinge on your graphics hardware, so one of the previous recommendations should yield a noticable effect.
Mylenium

I'm having problems with Maverick, it seems to make my mac slower than ever. How do I fix it?

I have recently download the maverick OS and my computer run slower than an 4 years old PC with tons of viruses. Someone knows why apple is making that mistakes? or how to fix the speed of my mac?

Read the threads over on the right under the heading of More Like This
Allan

PS CS3 much slower than CS2 on Intel Mac. I don't get it.

Yes, very very strange.
I work with very large files, so I just got a spiffy new Mac Pro. It's my first Intel machine, so I expected that CS2 would drag a little bit, due to Rosetta. In fact, moving from one processor to eight of them seems to have much more than compensated. Nevertheless, I ordered CS4 and while I wait I downloaded the demo of CS3.
I expected that CS3 would fly (no Rosetta) but have found my test tasks taking an inordinate amount of time... much slower than CS2 on the same Xeon workstation, and slower than CS2 on my old iMac (single 2.1GHz G5)
Since I work with extremely large files, I got a hardware RAID5 made up of four 15,000RPM SAS drives. I can't get enough RAM to avoid using scratch disk, so I attacked the biggest performance bottleneck. I did get 8GB of RAM; would have gotten more, but I read that it won't matter until CS goes 64-bit in CS5 at the earliest.
The rest of it: dual quad-core 2.8GHz "Woodcrest" Xeon processors, NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT graphics card, OS X 10.5.5, all updates (Apple and Adobe) applied as of 6pm Wednesday October 8th.
I'm running two tests as my benchmark: open a file (PSD created with CS2, 75" x 75" at 400ppi, two layers, RGB with one additional channel) and resize to 75" x 75" at 800ppi. Once that is done, I rotate the new, massive file counterclockwise 18.5 degrees.
On my old setup, 2.1GHz SP G5 iMac with CS2, these tasks took 38m 30s and 1h 33m 22s respectively.
New machine with CS2: 10m 09s and 29m 14s respectively
New machine with CS3: 42m 38s and 1h 36m 24s
(above tests run repeatedly: these numbers are the fastest numbers for each configuration)
I have nothing else running for these tests, except for Activity Monitor. What I've observed with Activity Monitor: the old G5 was pegged at (or very near) 100% CPU the whole time. Mac Pro with CS2, Photoshop ran most of the time on one CPU at a time, but spiked up as high as 250% CPU usage just for Photoshop.
I haven't seen Photoshop CS3 use more than 80% of one processor the whole time on the Mac Pro. Mostly it sits around 35%.
One more informal test: if I open that same file and downsample from 400ppi to 200ppi, CS2 does it in 1m 40s. CS3: 6m 57s. I don't have the iMac any more so I can't tell you how long it would take there.
In both CS2 and CS3 the scratch disk is my startup volume, but it's a RAID. I can't add any more drives except for external drives. I could have configured it to one dedicated system drive and a second scratch volume made up of the remaining three drives, but I consulted with people who know RAID better than I do who agreed that since everything is going through the SCSI controller and everything gets written to multiple drives in order to make it faster that I'd get a performance hit by splitting the RAID into two volumes, even if multiple processes are trying to get at the same drive array. Even adding a Firewire 800 drive for scratch would be slower than using the RAID. Or so I've been told.
So, this seems absurd. CS3 is not using Rosetta, right? So it should be flying on my machine. What on earth could I have done to a fresh CS3 (demo) install to make it slower than CS2 on my old G5? Is the CS3 demo crippled? Is there a conflict having CS2 and the CS3 demo on the same machine?
I'm stumped.

>Ya see, this is the attitude you really, really should get over. The Photoshop CS3 (10.0.1) code is just fine... it's your system (hardware/software) which, for some reason is not providing an optimal environment.
Jeff, I agree completely. You seem to be assuming that I actually think Adobe wrote bad code. In fact, I believe Adobe did NOT write bad code (and I wrote that) but that the condition that you are suggesting (CS3 being slowed by having having scratch and system on the same volume to a far greater extent than CS2) could only be caused by bad code by Adobe. Since I believe that, as you say, a universal difference of this magnitude between CS2 and CS3 would be noticed by huge numbers of users, I doubt that what I am seeing is the result of having scratch and system on the same volume.
In case I'm being less than clear:
Scratch and system were on the same volume for CS2.
Scratch and system were on the same volume for CS3.
On my system CS2 performs tasks three to four times faster than CS3.
ergo, either there is some problem other than scratch and system being on the same volume (perhaps something that exacerbates the scratch/system/same volume issue, OK, I accept that possibility) or else the change has been between CS2s and CS3s handling of scratch disks.
If for the sake of argument we rule out the possibility that CS3 handles the condition of scratch and system being on the same volume worse than CS2 does, the only possibility left is that there is SOMETHING ELSE WRONG WITH MY SYSTEM.
I am trying to find out what that other thing is. You're the one insisting that scratch and system being on the same volume is the cause of the CS3 slowdown. Accusing me of not believing that there's something wrong with my system misses the mark entirely. I ABSOLUTELY believe there is something wrong with my system.
> Your RAM tests sound pretty thorough, but if I had your large-files workflow I would buy two (or preferably 4) 4-GB sized matched RAM DIMMs, remove all the existing RAM, and install only the new RAM to further test whether or not the old RAM is anomalous.
Thanks Allen,
Actually, this is exactly what I've done, though in a different order. My system shipped with two 1GB chips. I bought two 4GB chips from OWC and installed them, and found my CS2 performance to increase significantly. It was only then that I tried installing the CS3 demo. When I found CS3 running my tests more slowly than expected, I pulled the new RAM out and tried with just the original 2GB and tested both CS2 and CS3 again. Then I took the original 2GB out, put only the new RAM in and tested CS2 and CS3 again, finding the same results. Currently I have all 10GB in the system and for the moment I'm setting aside the possibility of a problem with the RAM (or at least setting aside the possibility that the RAM chips are just plain bad) because that would indicate that both the new and the old RAM are both bad in the same way. That seems unlikely.
So I guess I'll have to drag the system down to the Genius Bar if I don't see an improvement from rearranging my hard drives.
The update there is that last night I backed up my system, and this morning I deleted my RAID5 set, blowing away everything on my system until I can restore from backup. The new configuration is 1 JBOD drive plus three drives attached as RAID0.
Unfortunately, neither of the new volumes is visible when I go to restore from backup. For the moment, this little experiment has cost me my entire system. The upshot is that it may be some more time before I have any more information to share. Even when I do get it working again, I can expect restoring to take the same 12 hours that backing up did.
I will certainly post here when I've got my system back.

IMac 27" i7 is slower than my 3 year old PC!

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