05-01-2012, 05:30 PM

Hi All,

I've done the research, searched online, tried a bunch of things, but am still experincing problems with my Mac slowing down, especially on start up.

I have a 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro, less than 2 years old, running 4 GB of RAM and OS Lion.

At first I tried all the usual, repair disk permissions, repair disk, MacKeeper, Onyx, virus scan, all did not work.

I then wiped all the free space, did not work. Then dumped a pile of video files, my hard drive is less than 20% full. Backup with Time Machine and restore. Did not work. Reset PRAM, and a few other of those types of things, including checking the start up programs, which finally resulted in me erasing the drive and reinstalling OS Snow Leopard, and manually putting my files back.

That seemed to work a little, I got a boot up in about 30 sec, but as I reinstalled and added programs, one by one, it went back to the old behaviour. So now I have Snow Leopard and a few files, and it takes well over 3 min to boot up. It's really no better, I almost want to restore from the Time Machine back up and start using Lion again.

What am I missing?

05-01-2012, 05:32 PM

Originally Posted by dkclark

What am I missing?

You did a lot of good stuff! Could be a bad HD.

Is this computer slow at any other time?

- Nick

05-01-2012, 05:46 PM

Originally Posted by pigoo3

Is this computer slow at any other time?

- Nick

Yes, there are times when it gets hung up and I look at the spinning colour wheel for several minutes.

The biggest offender seems to be Safari when I have multiple tabs open, when it was new it worked like a champ no matter how many programs I had going.

05-01-2012, 06:36 PM

Given all of the great troubleshooting you've done so far (including an OS reinstall)...and the problem seems to manifest at times other than just a slow booting...I would suspect something is up with the HD.

- Nick

05-02-2012, 06:04 AM

You don't mention the little stuff, like quitting/restarting Safari to release memory, and preventing windows from re-opening in Lion if that's your OS, and checking for unnecessary apps launching at login, but I presume that's covered under "the usual".

05-02-2012, 09:48 AM

Originally Posted by Demapples

You don't mention the little stuff, like quitting/restarting Safari to release memory, and preventing windows from re-opening in Lion if that's your OS, and checking for unnecessary apps launching at login, but I presume that's covered under "the usual".

Yes, I've reset Safari, and unclicked "reopen windows".

I checked for apps on startup, the only one was Dropbox, so I unchecked that too.

05-02-2012, 11:54 AM

Originally Posted by dkclark

Hi All,

I've done the research, searched online, tried a bunch of things, but am still experincing problems with my Mac slowing down, especially on start up.

I have a 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro, less than 2 years old, running 4 GB of RAM and OS Lion.

At first I tried all the usual, repair disk permissions, repair disk, MacKeeper, Onyx, virus scan, all did not work.

I then wiped all the free space, did not work. Then dumped a pile of video files, my hard drive is less than 20% full. Backup with Time Machine and restore. Did not work. Reset PRAM, and a few other of those types of things, including checking the start up programs, which finally resulted in me erasing the drive and reinstalling OS Snow Leopard, and manually putting my files back.

That seemed to work a little, I got a boot up in about 30 sec, but as I reinstalled and added programs, one by one, it went back to the old behaviour. So now I have Snow Leopard and a few files, and it takes well over 3 min to boot up. It's really no better, I almost want to restore from the Time Machine back up and start using Lion again.

What am I missing?

Been having similar problems with startup and read through the advice given which I tried without any success. My problem seemed to worsen after a recent backup. I noticed 'Start Disk' in 'System Preferences' Clicked on Mac OS X, 10.4.11 on Macintosh HD and restarted and everything is now back to the way it should start. It worked for me hope you find similar success.

05-02-2012, 09:27 PM

Anything hogging more resources than it should in activity monitor?

05-02-2012, 11:38 PM

Originally Posted by Hutchism

Anything hogging more resources than it should in activity monitor?

I don't really know much about what should and should not be running in the Activity Monitor.

There's some obvious apps of course, but not sure what all of them mean. I watched the % User stat under CPU for a few seconds, it seems to be fluctuating between 20 and 40%.