Very slow Aperture on MacBook Pro 2.16 Duo

Question

Hi All,
This is most likely a topic that has been covered before but Ive looked and cant find the answer. Ive got a 1.5 yr old MacBook Pro 2.16 intel duo with 2GB RAM (its maximum )
I bought Aperture 2 a few months ago, and its now started to run very, very very slow. I store my referenced files on a Lacie Drive (USB 2), however the issue seems to be that when I start browsing, exporting, editing and generally moving around the program, it gets to a point when the beach ball is on spinning overload. My Mac's fan is wizzing round like mad, It sounds like the things going to take off! Im really starting to lose faith and seriously looking at lightroom, but I love the structure on aperture. I have taken my Laptop to a mac store and even they have had a look over it, and cant understand why it runs slow. Its really disappointing that if its a hardware issue I cant do anything about it, plus I easily surpass the min specs to run it. Its holding up my workflow and costing me money in delivering files to clients!
Any help what so ever would be great,
Cheers Guys
Matt

Answer 1

I'm running the same model Duo with a 120GB drive and an external LaCie. It does not support the 800 Firewire, just the 400.
Aperture runs adequately fast, although after two months I'm still learning a lot about the features. The search HUD seems a bit slow, but I do have alot of pictures.
My Aperture Library is 14GB, 13,000 files, 90% are jpegs. All picture files are referenced and take up an additional 17GB.
I found Aperture (and Parallels) choking whenever the free space on my internal drive gets down below 6-8GB. Some non-Apple forums recommend keeping at least 10GB free for working with media intensive apps like Aperture. I also find that even when I quit Aperture, it doesn't free up the temp space on the disk drive it had used. Restarting regularly recovers the 1.5GB or so that Aperture was leaving behind after quitting.
I'm slowing breaking the big project I had with 11,000 files into several smaller projects and migrating the referenced files to an external LaCie. File management, renaming files, finding duplicates, etc., is not an Aperture strong point, (Expression Media is better at file and metadata management, but has limited editing and integration features with iLife, etc.) but over all I'm satisfied with performance on the Core Duo with an external monitor attached.
Cheers,
Flack