Macbook Pro and OSX sloooow!! Vista fast as hell

[thesutex]

Okay, before fanboys start targeting me for destruction let me just explain I have used Mac for 4 years prior, but last year I went backpacking for a year so I sold my 12" Powerbook which I loved. So now I am back and after using Vista on my main PC for 6 months I sold everything and bought a MacBook Pro SR.

Now OS X on this thing is sluggish as hell. After I boot up everything is fine, but as soon as I start Aperture and iPhoto is is just like having a G3 iBook again ;p I installed Bookcamp and Vista and that works like a charm.

Is anyone else having slow OS X with these new MacBook Pros?

(And can anybody tell me how to get dual display to work woth Bootcamp and Vista?)

 

[Cabbit]

Okay, before fanboys start targeting me for destruction let me just explain I have used Mac for 4 years prior, but last year I went backpacking for a year so I sold my 12" Powerbook which I loved. So now I am back and after using Vista on my main PC for 6 months I sold everything and bought a MacBook Pro SR.

Now OS X on this thing is sluggish as hell. After I boot up everything is fine, but as soon as I start Aperture and iPhoto is is just like having a G3 iBook again ;p I installed Bookcamp and Vista and that works like a charm.

Is anyone else having slow OS X with these new MacBook Pros?

(And can anybody tell me how to get dual display to work woth Bootcamp and Vista?)

Wile aperture and iphoto were first setting them selfs up on my mini they really slowed down the computer for quite a wile untill they processed all my images and stuff.

 

[AngelGuy7]

Okay, before fanboys start targeting me for destruction let me just explain I have used Mac for 4 years prior, but last year I went backpacking for a year so I sold my 12" Powerbook which I loved. So now I am back and after using Vista on my main PC for 6 months I sold everything and bought a MacBook Pro SR.

Now OS X on this thing is sluggish as hell. After I boot up everything is fine, but as soon as I start Aperture and iPhoto is is just like having a G3 iBook again ;p I installed Bookcamp and Vista and that works like a charm.

Is anyone else having slow OS X with these new MacBook Pros?

(And can anybody tell me how to get dual display to work woth Bootcamp and Vista?)

I think it's important to remember that Tiger is Apple's first OS on Intel chips and although Steve Jobs claims that they always had an Intel version of OS X I'm pretty sure that the PowerPC version is far more optimized for it's processor than the Intel version. This might be why your Macbook Pro might seem to have comparable performance at times to your old Powerbook.

However, reading through some posts regarding Leopard a common theme is that it's faster than Tiger. I would assume this is because Apple has been able to further optimize it's OS for the Intel platform. On the flip side, Microsoft has had years of development on Intel chips thus they have better experience with optimization on Intel chips.

I do have to admit that OS X does not seem as fast as I thought it would on the new Macbook Pro's, but then again I don't think it's horribly slow either (just a tiny bit sluggish at times). All I can say is to wait until Leopard comes out and ofcourse you can always try to do some of the cleanup\performance tweaking activities often mentioned in other posts.

 

[maxrobertson]

Aperture is notorious for being extremely sluggish. I assume if you used a program that was as much of a dog as Aperture in Vista, you might see it slow down as much or more.

 

[thesutex]

Aperture is notorious for being extremely sluggish. I assume if you used a program that was as much of a dog as Aperture in Vista, you might see it slow down as much or more.

Well, that is what is worrying me.. I had a Core2Duo 2.4ghz PC, but I ran Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom and played World of Warcraft at the same time without any slowdown. It may be Aperture that is thumbnailing all my pics that is slowing it down. But iPhoto just keeps crashing, useless!

I hope Leopard is more optimized =)

 

[whateverandever]

Well, that is what is worrying me.. I had a Core2Duo 2.4ghz PC, but I ran Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom and played World of Warcraft at the same time without any slowdown. It may be Aperture that is thumbnailing all my pics that is slowing it down. But iPhoto just keeps crashing, useless!

I hope Leopard is more optimized =)

don't count on it. Tiger is plenty fast on Intel macs. If you're not satisfied with the speed then its probe my a softwre issue and not mac os. You ant compare Mac os running Aperture and iPhoto to Vista running nothing. That makes no sense. If history tells us anything its that future OSs are slower not faster.

 

[uicandrew]

are both tiger and vista clean installs?

vista is obviously going to be a clean install but did you use migration assistant to move a bunch of stuff over?

 

[thesutex]

are both tiger and vista clean installs?

vista is obviously going to be a clean install but did you use migration assistant to move a bunch of stuff over?

yep and nop, I always do a clean install right out of the box to get rid of all the useless printer drivers and chinese languages No migration stuff, just plain old copying from ext hdd

And to the guy saying Vista runs smoother cause its clean, its not! I am running Adobe apps on it now, and its just blazing speed! I think my aperture is thumbnailing pictures, even though it doesnt say anything about it cause it is using 100% cpu.

So far OSX has been "buggy". iPhoto crashes, Automator hangs for a minute before starting, Front Row just takes ages, and booting is like a 2 minute coffee break

They better fix it in Leopard, i dont wanna spend 2000+ dollars on a mac, only to find myself having to use vista , hehe =)

 

[Erasmus]

You should try doing a clean system reinstall. 2 mins to boot up is insane. People are saying their SR MBPs boot up in 22 seconds every time.

 

[StealthRider]

If history tells us anything its that future OSs are slower not faster.

I agreed with you up until there. Apple has been very good about making the correct optimizations to increase speed in their OS updates. Microsoft hasn't, but they wanted to be on the bleeding edge with Vista (or at least say they were).

Also bear in mind that Leopard is 64-bit, which will increase the speed of the 64-bit MBP by quite a bit if it's coded properly.

 

[Mr. MacBook]

OS X is generally faster, but you might encounter a problem. Im not some apple fanboy, im on my first mac, and windows XP is my #2 OS. Try reinstalling like the others, im running a core duo macbook 1.83GHz and its speeding along fine.

 

[thesutex]

You should try doing a clean system reinstall. 2 mins to boot up is insane. People are saying their SR MBPs boot up in 22 seconds every time.

I just got this system set up after doing a clean install.. Ill wait it out and see what happens! =)

 

[whateverandever]

So far OSX has been "buggy". iPhoto crashes, Automator hangs for a minute before starting, Front Row just takes ages, and booting is like a 2 minute coffee break

They better fix it in Leopard, i dont wanna spend 2000+ dollars on a mac, only to find myself having to use vista , hehe =)

I've had none of those problems at all, and I've been using MacBook Pros for over a year. Mac OS loads faster than XP. Front Row loads immediately, never had iPhoto crash.

Tiger is fine... maybe your MBP is lemonish

 

[whateverandever]

I agreed with you up until there. Apple has been very good about making the correct optimizations to increase speed in their OS updates. Microsoft hasn't, but they wanted to be on the bleeding edge with Vista (or at least say they were).

Also bear in mind that Leopard is 64-bit, which will increase the speed of the 64-bit MBP by quite a bit if it's coded properly.

I'm speaking of prior system updates. For example, OS 9 to OS X. OS 9 on current hardware would run much faster than OS X. OS X is more feature heavy and graphically intensive.

Each OS iteration usually focuses on feature increase because you can't sell to most customers based on speed increase.

As for Leopard being 64-bit, math calculations are bound to run much better, but not everything will run smoother just due to 64-bit processing.

 

[maxp1]

The clue here is 100% CPU usage. Something is going on behind the scenes because even apeture while at rest isn't going to use 100% CPU. How many photos is it thumbnailing? Is it trying to index a huge drive?

In terminal type 'top -o cpu' (without the quotes.) This will tell you what's hogging the CPU.

 

[mahonmeister]

Um, the OS isn't slow, it's the apps that are hogging resources; and it looks like you already discovered that it is aperture.

Check your login items to see if some of those may be causing the 2 min startup time. I've watched a guy on youtube start up his SR MBP in under 30sec.

I think you have legitimate beef with Tiger though, it requires a good bit to keep maintained and I often have strange bugs pop up for seemingly no reason. Apple should include more capable maintenance software with Tiger, and should provide more info on maintenance to the average user.

 

[miniConvert]

To the OP: Your experiences certainly aren't normal.

I don't use Aperture, but it sounds like it's doing some very heavy lifting in the background. Maybe you should post some screenshots of the tabs in your Activity Monitor for us to oogle over?

I run CS3 on my SR MBP, not to mention WoW and all the usual stuff (messengers, browsers etc). My MBP starts in under 30 seconds (I haven't timed it, but it's fast as hell) and OS X Tiger is incredibly responsive.

If you can't find out what's wrong, get to a Genius and see if they can advise

 

[thesutex]

To the OP: Your experiences certainly aren't normal.

I don't use Aperture, but it sounds like it's doing some very heavy lifting in the background. Maybe you should post some screenshots of the tabs in your Activity Monitor for us to oogle over?

I run CS3 on my SR MBP, not to mention WoW and all the usual stuff (messengers, browsers etc). My MBP starts in under 30 seconds (I haven't timed it, but it's fast as hell) and OS X Tiger is incredibly responsive.

If you can't find out what's wrong, get to a Genius and see if they can advise

Hehe, Genious in Norway, nooo, nearest one in London But it has stabilized itself. Aperture indexed around 20k photos, and took like 1 whole day.. The weird thing about startup time is, on battery it IS like 30 seconds, on power it is more, uhu.. thanx for the input !

 

[korndog2003]

Let me ask you what size hard drive you have?

 

[AkiNikoTanTan]

hey guys, i was told that microsoft office is not optimize on intel mac but after i did some defrag using techtool pro 4, it start up juz like i did before in windows, maybe some de-fragmentation is still need though ppl say mac os x defrag itself.

 

[overcast]

hey guys, i was told that microsoft office is not optimize on intel mac but after i did some defrag using techtool pro 4, it start up juz like i did before in windows, maybe some de-fragmentation is still need though ppl say mac os x defrag itself.

As far as you are concerned, and as long as you leave a small % of space free, there is no such thing as fragmentation outside of Windows filesystems. Microsoft basically threw out decades worth of FS research when creating NTFS and we all suffer because of it.

 

[woodsey]

Aperture Slow on my SR Macbook Pro Too

Got my new SR Macbook Pro 2.2ghz (standard config) about a month ago.

I was upgrading from a G3 ibook, so naturally I was blown away by the performance of the Macbook Pro.

About a week ago I ported my entire iPhoto library (about 20,000 5 megapixel .jpg images) to Aperture. This is when I started to experience some terrible performance problems. Not just with Apertre, but the whole computer. And im not talking about, the thumbnailing process (although this did slow the computer down considerably at the time).

Now, aperture takes anywhere between 20 seconds and 10 minutes to start up. Sometimes it wont even start up at all. While aperture is starting, it slows down the entire system, sometimes to the point where it becomes unusable. But when I check the Activity monitor aperture is NOT hogging the system resources such as cpu and memory.

Having said that, once it's finished doing whatever the hell it does during launch, it runs pretty dam well when editing photos and whatnot. That is until it decides to randomly play up and become completely unresponsive and bring the system to a holt every so often.

I am completely new to Aperture. Is my library to big? Am Better off having Aperture handle all my photos in the Aperture library or having them manually stored in folders? Should I have all the photos on my external FW hard drive or on the internal disk?

 

[xeux]

Sounds to me like your bottleneck is simply the hard drive.

All of that media being cranked through a 5400 rpm laptop drive... you're going to get some lag. And if you try to do other things while running aperture it is simply not going to happen.

If you have an external 7200 rpm firewire drive i'll bet you anything that it resolves your issues.....

I don't care if you have a mac pro but you hook up a macbook pro 160GB 5400 RPM sata drive and use that for everything it'll run like ass

 

[L3X]

Got my new SR Macbook Pro 2.2ghz (standard config) about a month ago.

I was upgrading from a G3 ibook, so naturally I was blown away by the performance of the Macbook Pro.

About a week ago I ported my entire iPhoto library (about 20,000 5 megapixel .jpg images) to Aperture. This is when I started to experience some terrible performance problems. Not just with Apertre, but the whole computer. And im not talking about, the thumbnailing process (although this did slow the computer down considerably at the time).

Now, aperture takes anywhere between 20 seconds and 10 minutes to start up. Sometimes it wont even start up at all. While aperture is starting, it slows down the entire system, sometimes to the point where it becomes unusable. But when I check the Activity monitor aperture is NOT hogging the system resources such as cpu and memory.

Having said that, once it's finished doing whatever the hell it does during launch, it runs pretty dam well when editing photos and whatnot. That is until it decides to randomly play up and become completely unresponsive and bring the system to a holt every so often.

I am completely new to Aperture. Is my library to big? Am Better off having Aperture handle all my photos in the Aperture library or having them manually stored in folders? Should I have all the photos on my external FW hard drive or on the internal disk?

a FW 800 drive might be a good option. How much memory do you have? It seems like it's storing all those thumbnails and such in memory.

 

[AbsenceOfTruth]

WTF? I have the same MBP as you do and it's lightning fast... I have been a Windows users for many years before and I absolutely LOVE Tiger. I could be runnning Photoshop, iTunes, iPhoto and World Of Warcraft all at the same time with no hiccups... You just might have a BAD install.

Re-install OSX and see if that helps. Good luck!