Lion Upgrade=super slow laptop

i have an older macbook pro and recently upgraded to Lion and find my laptop is now incredibly slow especially in iTunes and IPhoto. any tips?

2 GB is a minimum requirement, 4GB or more is ideal. Also, being an "older" MBP the processor will be slower also.
That said, perhaps there are other factors affecting your speed.
Try Safe Mode (It will take more time to startup in Safe Mode because it runs a directory check.)
If your Mac runs faster that way, go to System Preferences > Users & Groups >Login Items and remove them. Boot normally and test. Then begin adding them back one at a time to find the culprit.

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Lion is super slow! Should I reinstall?

Hi,
I have a 13” MacBook Pro that has a 2.7GHz i7 processor and 4GB of RAM. I bought this June at it came pre-installed with OS X Snow Leopard. In July, I upgraded to Lion and initially, my computer just had the spinning beach ball a lot more, but a day or two later, my computer seemed like it was running as normal (I’m assuming this was due to Spotlight indexing everything).
However, of late I’ve noticed my computer is SUPER slow! I first noticed the lag in processing speed when it took five minutes to transfer 1GB to a USB flash drive. (I then transferred the files to a Windows PC and back onto the same flash drive and the entire process occurred in under a minute).It takes over two minutes to start up and anywhere between ten seconds to a minute to open a regular application (i.e. iTunes, iPhoto, Firefox, etc). And my laptop heats up a lot faster these days too!
I’ve looked around the discussion forum and tried all the suggested solutions i.e. resetting the PRAM and the SMC, verifying and repairing the disk/permissions (including the one where you have to go through the recovery partition). But nothing has helped. If anything, it's getting worse! Every time I open disk utility now it says it’ll take 4 hours to verify the disk permissions! AHHH. And it’s not like my laptop is filled with useless files, either; my hard drive capacity is 500GB and it still has 372.7GB available. Oh, and I don’t have a virus either because I’ve run the Sophos anti-virus scan three times.
Normally, I’d have taken my laptop to the Apple Store and asked them to figure it out, but I’m currently in the Philippines and they only have Apple Resellers and fake Apple Stores here. I realise it sounds ridiculous but I’m deathly afraid they are either going to kill my MBP altogether or steal my parts.
I was wondering should I completely re-install Lion? If so, how exactly would I go about doing that? I do have a Time Machine back-up of everything on my 1TB external drive, but I don’t have any back-ups prior to getting Lion because I purchased my external later. Also, if I were to re-install Lion and restore from my Time Machine back-up would all my applications still work? I have Microsoft Office 201, Adobe Pro, Photoshop, etc. and if they get uninstalled, I don’t have any of my installation CDs here!
I’d appreciate any help! If you have any ideas, comments, suggestions, anything – shoot me a response. Thank you!

Try to find out what is causing the loss of performance by starting the "Activity Monitor" (from Applications -> Utilities) and sort the processes according to real memory usage or CPU time by clicking at the column headers.
Also have a look at the free Disk space.
According to Apple the minimum hardware requirements for Lion are 2GB of RAM, but I found that not to be sufficient with the Applications I like to be running at the same time. For my workflow I needed 4 GB RAM when on SL, and with Lion I needed 8GB of RAM. The Activity monitor will tell you if you need to upgrade your RAM.
The second bottleneck with Lion is free disk space. Lion will run much more smoothly if you keep a least 10% (and a minimum of 20 GB) of your disk free.
If you find that you do need more RAM, but don't want to upgrade right now, look at the "Activity monitor" to find out which of your processes are fighting for memory and try to avoid running those together at the same time. I found that quite often Safari was eating the available memory and quitting Safari when I did not really need it did help a lot.
Regards
Léonie
P.S. There are quite a few threads in this forum discussing this. Search for "Lion slow"

Does anyone else think the new lion upgrade is slower than snow leapard?

After upgrading to Lion it seam everything is slower. Opening programs, running processes, working in programs. Yahoo account on foxfire I have to reload the mail about three time to get to it. Not real happy with the upgrade at this point.

I have started "top -o cpu" in a terminal and it seems that the process "mdworker" is taking up quite some cpu, together with some other kernel stuff.
Some searching on the www, and I learned that this could be due to the indexing activities mentioned earlier. It's odd tho. When I dive into it, it seems to be opening files on my Time-Machine device. Is that normal practice?

T42 - Vista upgrade - very slow laptop - help please

Hi
I have installed Vista Home Premium on my T42 (previously had XP Pro) and it is now very, very slow. Also it seems to have erased everything IBM - ie -Access IBM button not working.
Type 2373 - f1G, HD 40mb, Memory 500kb.
Do I need to increase hard disk? or memory? or both?
If I choose to reinstall XP Pro, how do I go about it? I do not have the original XP Pro disk and assume it must have been preloaded.
Sorry for the number of questions but I seem to have got myself into a situation over which my expertise is sadly lacking. Beginning to wish I left well alone.
Any help much appreciated.
Thanks
Maureen

Welcome to the forum!
There are several issues at work here:
a) RAM. You need at least (which is the maximum for your machine, BTW) 2GB for Vista to run properly.
b) Larger/newer/faster hard disk would also help.
c) Please be advised that your GPU is NOT supported by Vista and that you'll have to look for modded drivers on the web, and even with them your scores won't be good.
In my opinion, XP is the way to go for your machine. You can call Lenovo and order a set of recovery disks for a nominal fee.
Should you choose to stay with Vista, go to "support and downloads" page on Lenovo's website, put in your model number and start updating and unpacking the drivers...
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
George
In daily use: R60F, R500F, T61, T410
Collecting dust: T60
Enjoying retirement: A31p, T42p,
Non-ThinkPads: Panasonic CF-31 & CF-52, HP 8760W
Starting Thursday, 08/14/2014 I'll be away from the forums until further notice. Please do NOT send private messages since I won't be able to read them. Thank you.

Super slow laptop - hardware diagnostics

Satellite C855-S5206, example of slowness: uninstalled Kaspersky (eliminating possible software issues) it took hours, did complete. The CPU never moved above 5%, usually at 1. no messages, just slow, was done eventually. Swapped memory, no unusual tasks in memory, ran offline virus scan (MS security essential scan found nothing.) Windows 7 home prem 64.
I'm thinking CPU / cache problem, but without diagnostics, who knows? Any thoughts? Have I missed something?

Thanks for the reply, I will keep that number handy.
I finally determined by booting Linux and Bart PE CD's that the processor was running just fine. I'm guessing a virus that didn't make it all the way in had a conflct with Kaspersky and Windows lost, though I've never seen this symptom (and I have seen and removed a LOT of virus/root kit infections.)
Restore from hidden partition with user data saved worked fine. Of course followed by 2 hours of bringing Windows, etc. current on maintenance.
If this is a new virus, I would be interested if anyone finds a fix that doesn't require going back to the bare metal. I hate to do that.

Since upgrading to Lion, my MacBook Pro is super slow connecting to Wi-Fi. Not so with Daughter's Snow Leopard or Wife's Dell. Any ideas?

Since upgrading to Lion, my MacBook Pro is super slow connecting to Wi-Fi (seems to search forever). This is not the case with my Daughter's MacBook (still on Snow Leopard) or my Wife's Dell (Windows 7). Any ideas?

Hold Option when you click on the Airport in the top bar & post the stats.

Just upgraded to Lion now iMac runs super slow.

Things were running just fine now everything from the internet to iPhoto is running super slow. It hangs for about 10 seconds then moves on. Any thoughts on what I can check to clean up performance?
Thanks,
Andy

You should look at the Activity Monitor (located in /Applications/Utilities) to see what applications and processes are using up your Mac's resources.
Best of luck.

Mountain Lion Time Machine backup to USB drive super slow

I recently upgraded the MacBook Air to Mountain Lion. The time machine backup is SUPER SLOW even when doing it on a USB 3.0 Drive. It currently showing 2 days for 100GB backup. I was able to copy the same 100 GB of files on to the same hard disk in less than 1 hr. This is so slow that i might be better off managing back ups manually or just writing a small script to do it. But before I do so wanted to check if anybody else has the same issues.
Regards
Uddhav
Update:
Turning off the spotlight on the external hard disk helped improve the speed dramatically. Brought it down from 1 GB in 1 hr to almost 1 GB / minute.
System Preferences --> Spotlight
Add the Drive to the exceptions list. It will say this is a time machine disk so except the time machine folder everything else will be added to the exception list. Say Yes and thats it !!!
Now says 19hrs still a lot according to me but much better than 2 days.
Any body has any additional tips /tricks please share !!
Regards
Uddhav

uddhav wrote:
Turning off the spotlight on the external hard disk helped improve the speed dramatically.
That may indicate a damaged index. Keep an eye on subsequent backups -- if they take a long time, and/or show "indexing backup" on the Time Machine preferences panel for very long, you may need to delete it, so OSX can recreate it. See the pink box in #D2 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting for instructions.
It will say this is a time machine disk so except the time machine folder everything else will be added to the exception list.
Is there anything else on the drive (in the same partition)? If so, that's usually not a good idea. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #3 for an explanation.
Now says 19hrs still a lot according to me but much better than 2 days.
Yes, that's quite slow, especially if your Mac supports USB 3.
If it doesn't, it should be running at USB 2 speeds, which for a full backup should be, very roughly, 40-50 GB/hour.
See the rest of #D2 in the Troubleshooting link for other causes of slow backups.

Mountain lion super slow

I sooo frustrated... really don't know what to do.. Since I upgraded to Mountain Lion my system is a total mess.. everything has gotten super slow. I mean super slow!!
Help please!!

First, back up all data immediately, as your boot drive might be failing.
One possible cause of a slow user interface is a large number of image or video files on the Desktop with preview icons. If you have more than a dozen or so such files, move them to another folder.
Otherwise, take these steps 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.
Select the 50 or so most recent messages in the log. Copy them (command-C) to the Clipboard. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
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.

I'm having problems with my internet since I have upgraded. I am afraid to upgrade on my Macbook pro now. I don't want the upgrade to slow down my laptops. Any suggestions?

I'm having problems with my internet since I have upgraded. I am afraid to upgrade on my Macbook pro now. I don't want the upgrade to slow down my laptops. Any suggestions?

Wifi issues are one of the common issues being reported by users. There is not much you can do at this point but wait and hope that th 10.8.1 update will address these issues.

Since Mountain Lion Upgrade is my Internet connection very slow, Since Mountain Lion Upgrade is my Internet connection very slow

Why is Safari so slow after Mountain Lion upgrade?

I have a home Optimum wifi network with Boost connecting to an Airport, with a second Airport extending, and an Airport Express extending. I have a MacBook Pro, last year's model, two iMacs, a year old each, and an older iMac. (If necessary I can get all the models etc, but I just want to express the problem). The two new iMacs and MBP are running Mountain Lion. The older Lion.
Since upgrading to ML my connection speed both over the wifi and directly connecting to the router has dropped from 30-50 down and 5 up to between 1-4 down and 4 up. I have had the cable folks here to test lines. We've swapped out the modem with a new one. I bought a new netgear N600. Everything led to the same result.
Here's the odd part. When restarting the modem and plugging it directly into the powerbook, initial tests show 30-50 up and 5 down. But once you reconnect to wifi, lose speed, the re-connect directly to the modem the slowness persists directly connected to the modem.
So I start suspecting Mountain Lion. BUT the older iMac cannot be upgraded to Mountain and is still running Lion and has the same issue. The equipment is in the same place it's always been. We've added no electronics that would be interfering with signals.
Everyone is stumped and looking suspicously at the computer and OS. Please help. I'm beginning to hear the bing bong bing bong of dial up in my head.

HT1338 Hi, I have a 2.8Ghz i5 27" imac that after Mountain Lion upgrade is now painfully slow (currently memory 4g) any suggestions please

Hi, I have a 2.8Ghz i5 27" imac that after Mountain Lion upgrade is now painfully slow (currently memory 4g) with all latest updates etc...
any suggestions please, thanks

http://www.reedcorner.net/mpg/

Upgraded camera raw to 8.4 and now lightroom edit in ps pano super slow

Upgraded camera raw to 8.4 and now lightroom edit in ps pano super slow. Running cc versions of ps & lr

Camera raw not part of lightroom sentence difficult 2 understand

K recent upgrades my mac laptop to lion. Since then iMovie crashes when i try to export a movie project. I ofter get a message that says not enough memory in the heap zone. What can be done?

I recent upgraded my mac laptop to lion. Since then iMovie crashes when i try to export a movie project. I ofter get a message that says not enough memory in the heap zone. What can be done?

I recent upgraded my mac laptop to lion. Since then iMovie crashes when i try to export a movie project. I ofter get a message that says not enough memory in the heap zone. What can be done?

We have two Mac laptops, does anybody know if you need to purchase the Lion upgrade for both?

We have two Mac laptops in the household, does anybody know if you need to purchase the Lion upgrade for each?

No. You only pay for Lion once and can then install it on all of your household Macs.
Purchase Lion in the App Store using one of your Macs and the install button will appear for Lion under the Purchases tab when you open the App Store with your other Mac. The App Store will ask for your user name and password to install Lion but won't charge you for the second install. If you have more than one iTunes account use the one that you used to purchase Lion. All apps in the App Store work this way.

Lion Upgrade=super slow laptop

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