Macbook Air 13" 320M choppy animations - should I be worried?

[DaSal]

My sister recently bought the latest Macbook Air 13" with the 320M GPU, standard edition with 2gb of ram. I noticed that all the OS animations are choppy, spaces, exposé, even stacks. She hasn't really noticed it that much, but to me it's extremely annoying, and I want her to have a perfect Mac experience. Most noticeably was when playing a video with iMovie, when you move the mouse the video controls move into the screen from the button, that was extremely choppy, and made the video itself choppy too.

I'm a little confused since I have a Macbook Air 11", and I have no animation choppyness. I'm a bit worried that something might be wrong with hers, maybe a faulty GPU? Is there a way I can check if it's functioning properly? Or fix the animations in some other way?

Should I get it replaced?

 

[Oppressed]

You could go through the standard debug steps to make sure its not something that she installed or some settings. Such as boot into safe mode, reset the PRAM, or even a clean install of the OS.

 

[GreyMatta]

My sister recently bought the latest Macbook Air 13" with the 320M GPU, standard edition with 2gb of ram. I noticed that all the OS animations are choppy, spaces, exposé, even stacks. She hasn't really noticed it that much, but to me it's extremely annoying, and I want her to have a perfect Mac experience. Most noticeably was when playing a video with iMovie, when you move the mouse the video controls move into the screen from the button, that was extremely choppy, and made the video itself choppy too.

I'm a little confused since I have a Macbook Air 11", and I have no animation choppyness. I'm a bit worried that something might be wrong with hers, maybe a faulty GPU? Is there a way I can check if it's functioning properly? Or fix the animations in some other way?

Should I get it replaced?

Sounds like she has the 10.6.7 graphics bug

To resolve it reinstall from the USB stick and then upgrade to 10.6.6 using the non-combo update from apple.com and do the same again to get to 10.6.7.

Make sure that you use the non-combo updates from the website. Once you are on 10.6.7 then you can safely use the software update built into OSX

There are a lot of people on n these forums who have had similar issues, myself included

 

[DaSal]

You could go through the standard debug steps to make sure its not something that she installed or some settings. Such as boot into safe mode, reset the PRAM, or even a clean install of the OS.

I'll try resetting the PRAM. The choppyness was present out of the box, so I can't imagine it's something she installed (since we hadn't installed anything yet). Installing all updates didn't fix it either. I'll try the PRAM and report back.

 

[hcho3]

Not sure what choppy animations means exactly. Without videos, it's hard to say. Unless you opened like 40 windows...

I have 10-15 windows open on my 13 inch MBA and I have no issue what so ever.

 

[DaSal]

Sounds like she has the 10.6.7 graphics bug

To resolve it reinstall from the USB stick and then upgrade to 10.6.6 using the non-combo update from apple.com and do the same again to get to 10.6.7.

Make sure that you use the non-combo updates from the website. Once you are on 10.6.7 then you can safely use the software update built into OSX

There are a lot of people on n these forums who have had similar issues, myself included

Thanks! That seems to have fixed it. At least, expose etc seem to run smoothly now. iMovie still stutters, but perhaps that's just because the Air can't really handle iMovie properly? Or because it only has 2gbs of ram?

 

[damnyooneek]

it's the ram that ran out. nothing is broken. close some applications or restart the computer and it will be smooth again.

 

[buddy1065]

I was in an Apple store watching hulu movies. The video glitch seemed to be present on all of the MBA's there, going away only when I went to the MBP section.

 

[DaSal]

it's the ram that ran out. nothing is broken. close some applications or restart the computer and it will be smooth again.

This was with no other apps running, from a fresh reboot.

I think it's just not fast enough to run iMovie smoothly, though I'm not sure. I'm just assuming cause the new iMovie has always been slow and sluggish, even on my 2011 MBP. (Although, significantly less)