exposé not smooth on MacBook?

[Dr_Maybe]

I was in a shop that had a MacBook on display along with a 15" MBP. I tried pressing F9 on both of them to see the exposé effect where all the open windows are next to each other. To my surprise, the effect was a bit laggy on the white macbook! The MBP did it smoothly, just like my pbook.

Maybe it was because the open apps were a bit heavy. But they were just maybe 4 iLife apps running idly, and the CPU's are dualcore. Only 512MB RAM, in both machines but shouldn't expose still be smooth?

Even my previous 800Mhz iBook G4 was pretty smooth with exposé when you had less than ~10 apps open as far as I remember.

How are your experiences with the macbooks graphics capabilities?

 

[gekko513]

RAM is the most important factor for smooth Exposé, and the iLife apps can be RAM hungry if there's lots of content in whatever is opened in them.

 

[count chocula]

my friend's 2.0 macbook with 512 mb of ram runs exposé flawlessly. its very fast and smooth. it doesnt slow down even with lots of windows.

 

[shadowmoses]

I've tested out Expose on my MacBook with 1.25gb RAM and it worked flawlessly even with loads of windows open....I can imagine though that with 512mb RAM and some memory hogging apps open it may struggle,

SHadoW

 

[7on]

When I first ran my Macbook (after setup assistant) I got all sorts of graphical goodies... slow exposé, Dashboard widgets sticking on the desktop for a split second, Dashboard crashing, and Front row taking a while to turn on. However, a restart after doing updates fixed this. Dunno if my settings were to blame or is the "optimize System Performance" after the install had anything to do with it. Oh I had been running a lot of Rosetta with installers and what not so maybe that took up a lot of RAM...

 

[chrispl]

expose works okay...

i have a stock 2ghz white macbook with 512ram of memory and expose works fine! even parallels and virtue works pretty well! sometimes when i have many things running expose does work a little slow, but thats to be expected with such little ram...

 

[kevin.rivers]

Yup. Intergrated graphics sucking now eh?

 

[chosenwolf]

I have a 2.16ghz 17" MBP and dashboard lags. This only happens on battery power, as soon as the computer is on external power, it works w/ no lag.

 

[yankeefan24]

I haven't had any problems with expose or dashboard on my black MB with 1 GB RAM. I have experienced front row taking a while to load, but other than that, dashboard is a huge improvement off of my 15 GHz PowerBook with 512 RAM. I am going to start trying games in boot camp tomorrow I may report back.

 

[CubeHacker]

I wouldn't judge the performance of a Mac based on the smoothness of Expose at the Apple stores. I remember about a year ago I went to the SOHO store, and *all* (and I mean ALL) of the Macs there, even the Quad G5, had choppy Expose animations - even after a reboot! I don't know what the heck Apple installs on those things that screws up Quartz Extreme, but thats not the way its supposed to be. Even my G4 cube had smoother animations than the Macs in the Apple Store!