Lion is laggy

After upgrading to lion,I find the OS to be VERY laggy. Using the Dock is frustrating at best and the same can be said of the menu bar. restarting the system only fixes the problem temporarily. Does anyone know of a fix for this? I don't want to revert to wiping the drive and reinstalling Snow Leopard but if there's no fix in the near future , I may have to do just that.........

Lion lagged a bit for me shortly after I first installed it, but was soon back up to speed. I imagine it was busy with things like reindexing in Spotlight and whatnot. If you've already been running Lion for a while and it hasn't cleared up, you've probably got something wrong. You'll want to consider some of the tips at the Mac OS X speed FAQ, keeping in mind that this was not written for Lion and some things may have changed.

Similar Messages

IMac w/ Mountain Lion, Slow/laggy internet

Im having a slow or laggy internet problem.
3.06 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
OS X 10.8.2
4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
1TB hard drive
space utilized 373.09 GB
Space free 626.26 GB
4GB memory
system memory :
free: 521 mb
wired: 536 mb
Active 1.73 GB
Inactive 1.24GB
Used 3.49
I recently came home from vacation a few weeks ago. Mac was powered down for 5 days. Started up machine and noticed a lag whenever I clicked on a web page. Page starts to load, there is a 10-15 second delay, then the rest of the page loads. It was extremely noticeable on youtube. Every action in safari or firefox was slow. Loading multiple youtube videos in different tabs was never a problem, now there is problems with videos loading extremely slow. Loading one video is nearly impossible. Web pages will load normal on one try, then a second later, you click to go to another page, extreme lag. Attempting to load flash style videos, lag when starting, bar on videos will load 1%, then lag for 10-15 seconds, then start loading the video's.
I got fed up and ended up updating to Mountain Lion after about a week. Along with using onyx to clean everything up. Installed Mountain Lion, speed seemed to return to 75% normal speed (original speed before problem developed). Lags were slightly there, but for the most part everything seemed good. A day or two later lag was back. Web pages are slow or laggy to load, videos inparticular. Sometimes I have to refresh pages because they stop loading halfway through.
Called my ISP they walked me through a bunch of tests and said the speed of the connection is fine, that it must be the computer. I pulled out an old Macbook I had (OS X 10.4) and there is no lag like on my iMac. There is no lag to start the loading of a video, then it starts, then the 10-15 lag, then continuing to load it.
Network set up is a motorola mstatea, apple airport express with airtunes, and an at+t microcell. mac is connected via airport to the wireless network. lag is still present with direct ethernet connection to modem.
One of the main uses of this machine is listening to multiple youtube videos during my work day. I used to be able to put a few in a queue, let them play. I now have to get up and go to the computer on every new video, to pause the playing of the video while it buffers and deal with the lag.
What can I do to fix this??

Hi, this has worked for a few...
Make a New Location, Using network locations in Mac OS X ...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2712
10.7 & 10.8…
System Preferences>Network, top of window>Locations>Edit Locations, little plus icon, give it a name.
10.5.x/10.6.x/10.7.x instructions...
System Preferences>Network, click on the little gear at the bottom next to the + & - icons, (unlock lock first if locked), choose Set Service Order.
The interface that connects to the Internet should be dragged to the top of the list.
10.4 instructions...
Is that Interface dragged to the top of Network>Show:>Network Port Configurations.
If using Wifi/Airport...
Instead of joining your Network from the list, click the WiFi icon at the top, and click join other network. Fill in everything as needed.
For 10.5/10.6, System Preferences>Network, unlock the lock if need be, highlight the Interface you use to connect to Internet, click on the advanced button, click on the DNS tab, click on the little plus icon, then add these numbers...
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
Click OK.

Lion very laggy. How to fix it?

Hello.
I have mid 2010 Macbook Pro (2.4ghz core 2 duo, 4GB DDR, nVidia Geforce 320m, Lion 10.7.2) and it has been running perfectly! Then a week ago something happend. Since then almost all animations are very very laggy (almost no animations).
Take a look at the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-JzrFMBQN0
Almost no application running, only Skype and Transmission running, but it doesn't matter it is always like this.
I have tryed some methods to fix that. Like cleaning the caches folder from lybrary and restarting after that, but nothing seems to help :/
There are a lot of similar problems in this and other forums with no solutions so for, I kind of secretly hope someone can help me!
Thanks

Reinstall Lion, preferably from scratch:
Install or Reinstall Lion from Scratch
If possible backup your files to an external drive or second internal drive.
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.
Erase the hard drive:
Select Disk Utility from the main menu and click on the Continue button.
After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Erase button and wait until the process has completed.
Quit DU and return to the main menu.
Reinstall Lion: Select Reinstall Lion and click on the Install button.
Note: You can also re-download the Lion installer by opening the App Store application. Hold down the OPTION key and click on the Purchases icon in the toolbar. You should now see an active Install button to the right of your Lion purchase entry. There are situations in which this will not work. For example, if you are already booted into the Lion you originally purchased with your Apple ID or if an instance of the Lion installer is located anywhere on your computer.

Why is the 2010 i7 MacBook Pro so laggy on Lion?

Now, here's my issue: my 2009 iMac works with lion perfectly with all applications. My MacBook Air, which I'll admit, I don't use much, appears to work fine under Lion; however, my 2010 i7 MacBook Pro is just pathetic at times. Now, it's most apparent in Safari, maybe that's just because I use Safari most often, where scrolling and zooming is very laggy. Sometimes I'll expand my fingers and have to wait a good 2 seconds or more to see the zoom animation cut through where it's supposed to be, relative to how far apart my fingers are. This does not happen on my 2009 iMac with the Magic mouse hooked up, but it is quad-core i7 vs the MacBook Pro's dual-core i7. It just doesn't make sense though. I know the Sandybridge i5's in the lowend MacBook Pros are more powerful than my i7 MacBook Pro, but they can't be so much more powerful that they lack all of these animation defects, while I feel them full force, right? Maybe it's the GPU? I honestly haven't tried keeping my Pro set to it's GT 330m because I thought it to be more of a CPU issue because the animation sems so simple even for the Intel Graphics 2000. I also see a huge issue when entering text in a text field, though this also happens in pages. I'll type words and they wont appear until seconds after. I'm rather perplexed at this issue, is the problem Lion? Should I report this under Apple Care, or what? Thanx for the help, guys!

Back up your Mac if you have not done so already. To learn how to use Time Machine read Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac - Apple Support.
Kaspersky cannot possibly convey any benefit and its presence will only complicate troubleshooting. Uninstall it according to its instructions. This document may help, though it appears woefully outdated: http://support.kaspersky.com/8366. Unfortunately I can't help any more than that. I attempted to install Kaspersky to evaluate it, but the installer repeatedly failed for reasons I was unable to determine.
Determine if the problems also exist in Safe Mode:
Safe Mode or "Safe Boot" is a troubleshooting mode that bypasses all third party system extensions and loads only required system components. Read about it: Starting up in Safe Mode
You must disable FileVault before you can start your Mac in Safe Mode.
Starting your Mac in Safe Mode will take longer than usual, graphics will not render smoothly, audio is disabled on some Macs, and some programs (iTunes for example) may not work at all.
Merely starting your Mac in Safe Mode is not intended to resolve the problem, it's to observe its performance without certain additional components.
To end Safe Mode restart your Mac normally. Shutdown will take longer as well.
System performance problems for reasons that cannot be isolated to any other cause justify an SMC reset. Be sure to read the procedure carefully and follow all the steps exactly as written, even if they seem inapplicable or trivial.
Corsair RAM is known to be deficient on Macs, and Google products are notorious for causing Macs to perform poorly.

I can not complete the boot on mountain lion after try to recover some deleted files, the macpro become very laggy and I needed to restart it so the problem apears

My Macbook pro suddenly stoped to work, after I tyryed to recover some pictures that I loose after formating my Mac a few months ago. This afternon the system become very instable and when I tryied do restart it I got the apple and the circle icon and after a few seconds the Mac turns it self off.
Thanks for any help
Sérgio

Press Command and R keys on boot, open Disk Utility and verify the drive. If it's damaged, repair. If it works properly, reinstall OS X Mountain Lion or restore your backup

How to do a Clean Install of Lion

Hope this will help someone.
I recently did a clean install of Lion on my Mac Pro (after doing an earlier Lion upgrade) and the performance difference is absolutely amazing. Before my Mac Pro was laggy and there all kinds of little glitchy bugs (I'm sorry I can't explain it better than that) with a lot of my applications. Since I use that machine to also administer the network, that just wasn't acceptable.
I'm convinced, after this experience, that a clean install of Lion is the best thing for me, so, this morning I decided to do the same thing to my MacBook Air (IMHO the best laptop ever invented).
Here's what I have done.
1. Download and install Carbon Copy Cloner to the laptop.
2. Clone the laptop hard drive to an external hard drive. I have a Seagate 500GB USB drive which had a 500GB partition with Lion already installed on it. There are instructions all over the web on how to install Lion to an external drive. I used disk utility to add a partition, effectively splitting the partition in two with Lion still installed on one of the partitions and the other partition "clean".
3. Donate to Mike Bombich's site. Carbon Copy Cloner is a remarkable program - I've paid a heck of a lot of money over the years for similar programs and they didn't work 1/2 as good.
4. Go into System Preferences, select the "Startup Disk" applet and select your Lion install on the external hard disk drive as the startup disk. I SUSPECT you could also set the cloned laptop partition as your startup disk, but since the Lion install was already on my external drive, I used that.
5. Reboot the laptop
6. Hold down Command + "R" during the startup process to boot to the recovery partition of the Lion install on the external disk.
7. When the menu pops up, select Disk Utility
8. Repartition your laptop hard disk drive. This will also erase everything on the laptop. You can not repartition your hard drive unless you are booting from an external install of Lion. The recovery partition is hidden so repartitioning the drive will fail if you try to do a clean install from your laptop.
9. When the partitioning is finished, quit Disk Utility and return to the previous menu.
10. Select "Reinstall Lion" and select your laptop hard disk drive as the target.
11. You'll have to authenticate to Apple with your Apple ID, so there should be no problem with downloading and reinstalling Lion.
12. Wait for the download and install to finish. The download will take longer than the install.
13. During the setup, use the Transfer Assistant to transfer the cloned drive items to the new Lion install.
When the TA and install is finished, you should be back to where you started with everything intact.
Good luck!

Hope this will help someone.
I recently did a clean install of Lion on my Mac Pro (after doing an earlier Lion upgrade) and the performance difference is absolutely amazing. Before my Mac Pro was laggy and there all kinds of little glitchy bugs (I'm sorry I can't explain it better than that) with a lot of my applications. Since I use that machine to also administer the network, that just wasn't acceptable.
I'm convinced, after this experience, that a clean install of Lion is the best thing for me, so, this morning I decided to do the same thing to my MacBook Air (IMHO the best laptop ever invented).
Here's what I have done.
1. Download and install Carbon Copy Cloner to the laptop.
2. Clone the laptop hard drive to an external hard drive. I have a Seagate 500GB USB drive which had a 500GB partition with Lion already installed on it. There are instructions all over the web on how to install Lion to an external drive. I used disk utility to add a partition, effectively splitting the partition in two with Lion still installed on one of the partitions and the other partition "clean".
3. Donate to Mike Bombich's site. Carbon Copy Cloner is a remarkable program - I've paid a heck of a lot of money over the years for similar programs and they didn't work 1/2 as good.
4. Go into System Preferences, select the "Startup Disk" applet and select your Lion install on the external hard disk drive as the startup disk. I SUSPECT you could also set the cloned laptop partition as your startup disk, but since the Lion install was already on my external drive, I used that.
5. Reboot the laptop
6. Hold down Command + "R" during the startup process to boot to the recovery partition of the Lion install on the external disk.
7. When the menu pops up, select Disk Utility
8. Repartition your laptop hard disk drive. This will also erase everything on the laptop. You can not repartition your hard drive unless you are booting from an external install of Lion. The recovery partition is hidden so repartitioning the drive will fail if you try to do a clean install from your laptop.
9. When the partitioning is finished, quit Disk Utility and return to the previous menu.
10. Select "Reinstall Lion" and select your laptop hard disk drive as the target.
11. You'll have to authenticate to Apple with your Apple ID, so there should be no problem with downloading and reinstalling Lion.
12. Wait for the download and install to finish. The download will take longer than the install.
13. During the setup, use the Transfer Assistant to transfer the cloned drive items to the new Lion install.
When the TA and install is finished, you should be back to where you started with everything intact.
Good luck!

Complicated problem: Laggy Macbook Pro, now not booting

I am facing a very complicated issue with my unibody Early 2011 15" Macbook Pro (2.2 ghz core i7, 4gb 1333mhz ram, amd radeon 6750m, if you need hardware details).
I guess the issue started after my computer started to get laggy for no reason at all: it was never the GUI that lagged, but whenever I would perform some data-dependent tasks such as playing a video, or trying to open a big file. This lagging did coincide with some of my friends playing around with magnets around my computer (which may have possibly corrupted hard disk data).
After it got laggy, another major problem hit my MacBook, where I plugged in an old, broken USB into one of the ports by accident, and the computer suddenly shut it self off. The computer then seemed to have no power at all, with no response to pressing power button, or the battery indicator button. I feared the worst: that my logic board had been fried, so I immediately took my computer to the Apple Reseller. The technicians there said it was no problem at all, just that my motherboard had shut itself of in order to protect itself from a USB power shortage, and he unplugged and replugged this one small component on the logic board, which I am guessing is the Power Management Unit, and my computer miraculeously started booting.
So then, I get back home, and the laggy problem is still there. I just had to cope with the problem for a few days, until I go back to the Apple Reseller, but then suddenly, after a restart, the computer started not even booting. The grey apple icon would blink, and turn into a circle with a cross icon. Checked online, and this is apparently related to corrupted system files. This is where I began to suspect that the USB shut-off from few days ago, did more damage than the technicians thought: maybe related to the hard disk, or RAM.
But then again, it could have just been a coincidental corrupt hard disk from my actions, so I wiped/repartitioned my hard disk, and restored the OS and my files from a TIme Machine Backup. Again, the problem was still there, so I thought it might be to do with my backed up system files, so I did a fresh install of Lion.
The fresh install of Lion seemed to eliminate all lagging problems, but after I started copying my files and installing applications from Time Machine, the lagging problem gradually returned. So another question arose, was it a faulty hard disk, or a corrupt file or application that was making it laggy? To check if it was my hard disk, I did a zero-over erase of the entire disk with Disk Utility, and sure enough, the writing process failed in the middle.
After thinking I zeroed in on the problem, I replaced the hard disk in my Macbook Pro with another 750gb Toshiba SATA drive, and did a clean install of Lion. Once again, the laggy problem was gone, but just like the old hard disk, the laggy problem returned after I started copying files over and installing applications. Switching applications would take forever, and accessing folders on my hard disk would also be laggy. Playing videos was impossible, but the GUI (dock, spaces, etc) were all very responsive.
Now, I thought the problem is either with faulty RAM, or my hard disk reader is broken (since two hard disks, although the original one was faulty, both failed). I read online that the Apple Hardware Test (AHT) can help identify and pinpoint hardware problems, so I inserted the 2nd disk that came with my computer (Applications Install), and pressed D, but then nothing came up. After countless attempts, I maybe thought it was the wrong disk, so I inserted the 1st disk (OS Installer), and held D while booting, but still, AHT would not load.
After countless attempts at loading AHT, all of which led to me forcing shut down/holding power button after seeing the Apple logo, brings the problem to where I am at now: my Macbook does not boot into the login screen. After the Apple logo, and the spinner wheel have appeared, the screen turns white and the display becomes an infinite loop of switching from a gray color, to a white color.
This problem is frustrating me very much, because there are so many possible causes, and the problem persists even after reinstalling the OS, and even replacing the ard drive. The logic board shutoff could be the cause, but then again, the lagging problem started way before it happened. Somebody please tell me what is the problem, and what I should do? Thanks in advance.

novaria wrote:
Didn't know my magnets were strong enough to corrupt hard disks.
Yes, it's a method used to destroy data on a hard drive as it's recorded using magnetic fields, either "on" or "off" to represent the 1's and 0's that make up the basic building blocks of your data.
But, the magnet does not explain why the hard disk reported an error when being erased with zero-over option.
When the driver software has a problem reading the data on the drive, it assumes it's a bad sector, then maps it off and uses a spare. You likely ran out of spares.
I just tried zero-over erasing the second, good hard disk that replaced the original, but again, it fails. Is this a common problem with the zero erase option?
No.
or is it something to do with my hard disks, or some sort of damaged hardware in my computer?
Well this is drive #2 and it's new, and you get the same problem.
It's either something your doing, (like moving the hard drive/ computer while it's operating thus the heads are striking the platters) or it's a hardware defect, or perhaps the magnets did other damage we can't see, perhaps it's magnatized the computer and that's affecting the hard drive or electronics.
May be a loose or defective cable.
It's time for a hardware evaluation at this point.

Why is my macbook so laggy all of a sudden?

It started close to a week ago. It will work normally for like an hour or so, then it randomly starts lagging. Every time I try to click something, the beach ball of death appears for 30 or so seconds, everything that I have open just STOPS working and stops responding. This will happen for maybe 15-30 minutes, then it will return to normal, then it'll go back to being laggy.
- I haven't used more than 1/4 of the hardrive space, so its not short on space.
- I've used disk utlity, and the SMART status said Verified, so my hardrive seems to be OK.
- I've used repair disk permissions from Disk Utlity, an everything came out fine.
- I've cleaned out all my caches with CCleaner, it took out 9gb of ****. This helped for like 15 minutes, then it went back to being really ******* laggy.
This has been ******* me off to the point in which I don't use my laptop because I can barely do anything for more than 30 minutes without it lagging. .
I/m thinking of just reinstalling Mountain Lion. My qquestion with that is, if I partition my external hardrive between my backup data files and the new OSX, will I lose my files from the other partition when I reinstall mountain lion? Will it wipe the whole external hardrive?
What do you think is wrong with my mac? What other ways could I try and fix the problem?
My macbook is a late 2011 15 inch pro. I bought it in September 2012 at my school, fresh in the box, no reburishing.
I didn't put any programs on in the past week that would have caused this.
Its ******* me off.
**** IT TOOK ME MORE THAN ENOUGH TIME TO TYPE THIS BECAUSE OF THE ******* LAG

First, back up all data immediately, as your boot drive might be failing.
There are a few other possible causes of generalized slow performance that you can rule out easily.
Reset the System Management Controller.
If you have many image or video files on the Desktop with preview icons, move them to another folder.
If applicable, uncheck all boxes in the iCloud preference pane.
Disconnect all non-essential wired peripherals and remove aftermarket expansion cards, if any.
Check your keychains in Keychain Access for excessively duplicated items.
Otherwise, take the steps below when you notice the slowdown.
Step 1
Launch the Activity Monitor application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Activity Monitor in the icon grid.
Select the CPU tab of the Activity Monitor window.
Select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected.
Click the heading of the % CPU column in the process table to sort the entries by CPU usage. You may have to click it twice to get the highest value at the top. What is it, and what is the process? Also post the values for % User, % System, and % Idle at the bottom of the window.
Select the System Memory tab. What values are shown in the bottom part of the window for Page outs and Swap used?
Next, select the Disk Activity tab. Post the approximate values shown for Reads in/sec and Writes out/sec (not Reads in and Writes out.)
Step 2
If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out this step.
Launch the Console application in the same way you launched Activity Monitor. Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Select the 50 or so most recent entries in the log. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V). You're looking for entries at the end of the log, not at the beginning.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some personal information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting. That should be easy to do if your extract is not too long.

My MacBook Pro has been incredibly slow and laggy

So my MacBook Pro has been pretty much inoperable for a couple of months. The computer crashed and afterwards it would constantly lag. I did a fresh install thinking it would solve the problem, but it did not do anything. I took the computer to the Genius Bar, and they claimed that it was because I was running too many apps and that the computer was slowing down (doesnt make too much sense considering its a mid 2012 and on a fresh install) and then promptly sent me home. When you flash the memory in the beginning, sometimes it will be less laggy for a second, but then start lagging a couple minutes after computer use (this is still on a virtually clean install). I took their suggestion and added a SDD thinking it might help. Nope. So the hardware tests/diagnostics are all normal and I have no idea whats going on. It literally took me 10-15 minutes to run the EtreCheck and copy into mail so I could post these results from another computer. I will love anyone forever if they could explain to me how to fix this.
EtreCheck version: 1.9.15 (52)
Report generated September 17, 2014 1:44:57 AM EDT
Hardware Information: ?
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012) (Verified)
MacBook Pro - model: MacBookPro9,2
1 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU: 2 cores
4 GB RAM
Video Information: ?
Intel HD Graphics 4000 - VRAM: 512 MB
Color LCD 1280 x 800
System Software: ?
OS X 10.8.5 (12F45) - Uptime: 0 days 0:14:30
Disk Information: ?
APPLE HDD TOSHIBA MK5065GSXF disk0 : (500.11 GB)
S.M.A.R.T. Status: Verified
disk0s1 (disk0s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB
Untitled (disk0s2) / [Startup]: 499.25 GB (479.83 GB free)
Recovery HD (disk0s3) <not mounted>: 650 MB
MATSHITADVD-R   UJ-8A8
USB Information: ?
Apple Inc. FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in)
Apple Computer, Inc. IR Receiver
Apple Inc. BRCM20702 Hub
Apple Inc. Bluetooth USB Host Controller
Apple Inc. Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad
Thunderbolt Information: ?
Apple Inc. thunderbolt_bus
Gatekeeper: ?
Mac App Store and identified developers
Launch Daemons: ?
[loaded] com.adobe.fpsaud.plist Support
[loaded] com.bombich.ccc.plist Support
User Login Items: ?
None
Internet Plug-ins: ?
FlashPlayer-10.6: Version: 15.0.0.152 - SDK 10.6 Support
Flash Player: Version: 15.0.0.152 - SDK 10.6 Support
QuickTime Plugin: Version: 7.7.1
JavaAppletPlugin: Version: 14.6.0 - SDK 10.8 Check version
Safari Extensions: ?
Adblock Plus
Audio Plug-ins: ?
AirPlay: Version: 1.7 - SDK 10.8
iSightAudio: Version: 7.7.1 - SDK 10.8
iTunes Plug-ins: ?
Quartz Composer Visualizer: Version: 1.4 - SDK 10.8
3rd Party Preference Panes: ?
Flash Player Support
Time Machine: ?
Time Machine not configured!
Top Processes by CPU: ?
     2% WindowServer
     1% Activity Monitor
     0% activitymonitord
     0% blued
Top Processes by Memory: ?
57 MB mds
37 MB Dock
33 MB WindowServer
25 MB ocspd
20 MB SystemUIServer
Virtual Memory Information: ?
1.91 GB Free RAM
578 MB Active RAM
401 MB Inactive RAM
1.13 GB Wired RAM
194 MB Page-ins
0 B Page-outs

I don't see anything significant.
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
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.
Repair the Hard Drive - Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the Utilites 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 disk icon and click on the arrow button below.
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.
Restart your computer normally and see if this has helped any. Next do some 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.
Note: Alsoft ships DW on a bootable DVD that will startup Macs running Snow Leopard or earlier. It cannot start Macs that came with Lion or later pre-installed, however, DW will work on those models.
Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
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 later 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.
Helpful Links Regarding Malware Protection
An excellent link to read is Tom Reed's Mac Malware Guide.
Also, visit The XLab FAQs and read Detecting and avoiding malware and spyware.
See these Apple articles:
Mac OS X Snow Leopard and malware detection
OS X Lion- Protect your Mac from malware
OS X Mountain Lion- Protect your Mac from malware
About file quarantine in OS X
If you require anti-virus protection I recommend using VirusBarrier Express 1.1.6 or Dr.Web Light both from the App Store. They're both free, and since they're from the App Store, they won't destabilize the system. (Thank you to Thomas Reed for these recommendations.)
Troubleshooting Applications
I recommend downloading a utility such as TinkerTool System, OnyX, Mavericks Cache Cleaner, or Cocktail that you can use for removing old log files and archives, clearing caches, etc. Corrupted cache, log, or temporary files can cause application or OS X crashes as well as kernel panics.
If you have Snow Leopard or Leopard, then for similar 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. Applejack does not work with Lion and later.
Basic Backup
For some people Time Machine will be more than adequate. Time Machine is part of OS X. There are two components:
1. A Time Machine preferences panel as part of System Preferences;
2. A Time Machine application located in the Applications folder. It is
    used to manage backups and to restore backups. Time Machine
    requires a backup drive that is at least twice the capacity of the
    drive being backed up.
Alternatively, get an external 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. Get Backup
3. Deja Vu
4. SuperDuper!
5. Synk Pro
6. Tri-Backup
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files. For help with using Time Machine visit Pondini's Time Machine FAQ for help with all things Time Machine.
Referenced software can be found at 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:
Pre-Mavericks
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 (>=70,) 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.
Mavericks and later
Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder. Select All Processes from the View menu. Click on the CPU tab in the toolbar. Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order. If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time (>=70,) 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.

Is anyone facing problems with quicktime on lion???

I recently upgraded my macbook pro to lion osx and the problems keep showing up one by one... quicktime is the worst. it has literally stopped functioning! at first, there was this problem with audio and video not being synched; and then it got worse and was totally playing the videos without any audio track and now, after a week or so, the app is not working AT ALL!!!
I hit "play", the icon changes to "pause" as in : "i'm playing the video!" and then it stops and NOTHING HAPPENS. and it's not about the format of the videos either. i treid .wmv (which was working btw), .avi or .mov (made by imovies for crying out loud!)...
when its photoshop being slow and laggy, you can blame adobe! but isn't quicktime supposed to be the "official" apple player??? am heavily disappointed apple!

First:
iOS: Troubleshooting FaceTime
Then
Try:
- Reset the iOS device. Nothing will be lost
Reset iOS device: Hold down the On/Off button and the Home button at the same time for at
least ten seconds, until the Apple logo appears.
- Go to Settings>FT>You can be Reached At and sing out and sign back in
- Reset all settings
Go to Settings > General > Reset and tap Reset All Settings.
All your preferences and settings are reset. Information (such as contacts and calendars) and media (such as songs and videos) aren’t affected.
- Restore from backup. See:
iOS: Back up and restore your iOS device with iCloud or iTunes
- Restore to factory settings/new iOS device.

Jerky, laggy graphics on windows 7 on macbook pro but graphics are fine on OS X

I installed windows 7 and all the apple support files for windows using bootcamp on my brand new macbook pro 15inch.
I get very noticeable laggy, jerky graphics on videos that i play with VLC or windows media player in Windows 7.
If there is motion in the video you can really see it is not smooth.
and the quality of the display of youtube videos is much better on OS X than on windows but not jerky.
BUT if i play exactly the same files on OS X mountain lion they play perfectly,please help.
The apple support files for windows are up to date as well - I checked.
My Spec is Windows 7,
And the most recent OS X Mountain Lion.
2.6Ghz quad core Intel i7
16 GB RAM.
and the rest of the normal spec for a brand new macbook pro.
Any help would be massively appreciated.

Uninstall the graphic drivers you have, then download and install these.
http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/59645

Why does it lag so much when I scroll in Safari? (OS X Lion)

I've noticed that ever since the OS X Lion update, webpages in general are pretty laggy when scrolling. I let the page completely load and when I scrollthere is stuttering and lag. It is made most apparent when I use momentum to scroll a long webpage.
It seems to happen mostly with more complex pages (which makes sense I guess). For example, some parts of NYTimes.com doesn't have much lag when scrolling. But most websites (like mine: http://wistfulwriter.com) are pretty laggy. I know I use a background image and use special fonts, but I never had this problem before the Lion update. Many other sites lag too: CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com, etc. It seems like any time there is an image, there is stuttering.
I have tried setting the zoom level to default (command-0) just in case, and I have exited unnecessary applications and everything. The lag is still there, regardless if I use fullscreen mode or not (though on some sites it is not as noticable in windowed mode).
Any clues? Thanks!

Clay G wrote this on another thread so I'll give you his suggestions and it WORKED FOR ME!
Go to FINDER-LIBRARY-PREFERENCES- and delete the folder com.apple.safari.rss.plist
Go to FINDER-LIBRARY-CACHES- and delete the folder com.apple.safari
Restart your Mac.
I too was experiencing some severe lagging in some web sites-using Safari.
Also heard that Adobe (v 10.1) can cause lagging problems. V. 10.0 is more stable.
Did what Clay offered and NO MORE LAGGING.
BTW, you'll have to do a search(SPOTLIGHT) for SAFARI but it pops right up and you still have all your bookmarks and favorites.
Hope this helped.

OS X Lion Screen Sharing Slow on MBP 13" (Early 2011)

Hello All,
I've been cruising forums and various posts, but have not seen anything directly relating to the issue I'm having. I just upgraded all my Macs to Lion and when I screen share(SS) from my lion macs at work to my lion macs at home there has been a notable drop in performance.
Here's where it get's stupid though. I can screen share to my Mini with very little to no lag at all from my MacBook Air at work. The Mini is directly hooked to my time capsule (2008,1TB). However, when I SS into my MBP 13" early 2011(wireless connection) the MBP becomes almost completely unresponsive or delayed to any change by 5+min.
I tried ss'ing into my mini and then from my mini to my MBP 13" and that was at least responsive, but obviously laggy. So what the frick man. Why can't I SS into my MBP from work? This was never an issue when all these macs were running 10.6.8.
I guess I should also mention that the Mini hasn't been able to update ARD 3.5 yet, because of a separate issue that I haven't gotten around to. Is it perhaps the ARD update that is screwing up my MBP13"?
Suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I have the same problem. I think it has to do with the 'server' computer. When I remotely control my other snow leopard computers, it is snappy. When I connect to my iMac running Lion, it is slow. The whole page blinks like it is rendering all text/images/backgrounds all the time. So it seems to be loading the entire frame. On the contrary, when remoted into a Snow Leopard machine, only the word or area that you are typing is blurry, then crisp as it renders. It doesn't try to reload the whole screen since you are only modifying a small portion of it.

Photobooth mac mini lion

I recently upgrade to Lion a couple of months. I opened my photobooth application and it was very laggy and slow. Hopefully someone can help me with this problem.

coocooforcocoapuffs wrote:
But my big question here is: why isn't this product treated like a seperate product, with it's own forum? or docs on setup? All I can find in how to install/migrate Lion server, but nothing specific to the stuff in the box (preconfigured lion server, two drives, etc.) So do I just try and use the installing Lion Server docs and try and figure out where to jump in?
Also, is there a site where I can go to get answers about the setup itself... I have the PeachPit Apple Pro book, but again, it's really dense. I don't want to be certified, I just want to set up a webserver, learn about Active Directory, set up workgroup access for a small team, set up a media and mail server. That's it
There is in fact a forum for Lion Server Right here:
https://discussions.apple.com/community/servers_enterprise_software/mac_os_x_lio n_server
Just needed to scroll down further on the community list.
And going here:
http://www.apple.com/support/lionserver/
is the Lion Server support site.
This forum is for general Mac Mini hardware issues and the
above are for Lion Server issues. There is no need for
two seperate forums as they already exist.
As for the iMovie issue and MAS, that is the way Apple decided to
move since it is purchasable/upgradable software.

MB Pro 2011 laggy and choppy!!!

I own a barrely 1 year old Macbook Pro and I´m starting to notice some lagging on it.
First I noticed Safari crashing every now and then when i open a new tab, then Safari started getting slow and using a lot of memory.
What I just recently noticed was when I do the "three finger swipe" to see all my widows - it´s not "zooming out" very smooth, instead it is laggy and choppy!!
Must say it´s very annoying and it might seem as it is a minor issue, but my Pro is not even a year old and it shouldn´t be doing that in the first place.
But also, I see it as there must be a bigger underlaying issue???
So, I decided to do a recovery and re-install Lion, took a few hours and it didn´t change anything. At least not the lagging when swiping three fingers, Safari hasn´t crashed yet, but it´s only been an hour since I recovered tho.
What could be the problem?!

Many have suggested that some choppy playback issues (for in-browser playback) are related to the Adobe Flash plugin.
Adobe has released a new version of the Flash plugin this week, which may perform better (although I can't confirm that the problem has gone away completely).
Here are some steps to follow to cleanly update your Flash:
1) Download the Flash plugin un-installer from Abobe, available at: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html
2) Close all browsers on your machine and run the Abobe Flash plugin un-installer you downloaded for your platform.
3) Open your browser and reinstall the Adobe Flash plugin (v.10.0.42.34 or greater), available from Adobe at: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
4) After the installation, close and re-open your browser, then try playing back some Flash video at YouTube or wherever...
Hopefully this works. Good luck.

Lion is laggy

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