01-27-2008, 10:57 PM

Hey guys,

I recently purchased a MacBook Pro in early December of 2007. I've had it now for about a month and a half and I'm gonna be honest. I'm not too sure about my whole Mac experience. At first there was this great excitement about finally getting a Mac after months of contemplation. And it was an expensive MacBook Pro to boot. After having used Windows for nearly 10 years, I was finally using a Mac extensively. When I switched from Windows, it was basically because I was just looking for a change of pace. I was no coding, computer genius. But I had pretty much mastered Windows and could easily run my computer with absolutely zero problems. Turning on my computer to the very minimalistic and eye pleasing Mac desktop, I was fully embracing the change. However, after this month and a half...I'm not sure how I feel.

I was hoping some people out there would be kind enough to shed some light and insight on some of my concerns. First off...my Mac runs real choppy sometimes. Some people in the Mac and Windows debate argue that Windows crashes all the time. They complain about the Blue Screen of Death and instability. Mac users praise the Mac's UNIX background touting it's reliability. Now before I switched, I was accustomed to have my Windows PC running for weeks at time before I really need a reboot. It seems that I reboot my Mac every couple of days. Programs close or freeze up. I don't know if this is hardware specific, but when I have a logitech cordless mouse and sometimes it freezes up or act sproadically. The touchpad sometimes acts weird and doesn't click when I click.

Sometimes the computer is lighten fast, other times the computer is deathly slow. I have a 2.2ghz Core 2 Duo with the Santa Rosa chip set. 2gigs of RAM, 120gig hard drive, 128mg grapics card. It has been pretty much hit or miss with the speed reliability. Most of the time I have about 5 programs open - Finder, Mail, Safari, Adium and iTunes. I have two widgets that I use...and I don't have a lot of other programs running behind the scenes.

I was wondering if maybe I format my hard drive and do a fresh install with the Leopard OS drop in they provided if I could see any benefits in reliability and such. I am running Tiger 10.4.11 by the way. I have some maintenance programs such as Onyx and Xupport that I try to use to help with the system. I dunno. I could ramble on for a long time about all my concerns, most of them just petty concerns. I will leave it at this -- if anyone could give me some insight into really keeping my machine and keep condition. Please share.

01-28-2008, 07:44 AM

Hey mo!

To see if the problem is system-wide, can you create a new user account? See how the Mac reacts in that new account. If it's behaving normally and doesn't go through slow-downs, then it means there is an incompatibility or some kind of corruption of data in your usual account.

01-28-2008, 10:51 AM

I am running pretty much the same setup as you - just got my MBP two days ago. The first thought that comes to mind is to check whether any of the applications you routinely have open are not universal binaries. If you are running older PPC programs, Rosetta (the PPC interpreter) will exact a price in performance.

After that though, I would spend some time with Activity Monitor (in your Utilities folder) and see where the CPU time is going when the machine feels slow.

Finally, I would check in System Preferences, Accounts, your user account, Start Up Items and just see if something is getting started and run in the background that you did not want.