Major speed problem with Leopard

I've read some other messages posted here about people experiencing a significant delay in startup and in launching certain applications since installing Leopard, which I suppose to some extent is to be expected, however my MacBook Pro has slowed down dramatically, from startup to shut down (both of which take at least four or five times as long as they used to). Before I installed Leopard, my computer operated really quickly and I had no lag at all. Now it takes quite a while even for Firefox to start up or for a window to open when I double click a folder's icon. Does anyone know any way I can fix this? I don't understand why it would be so slow. I only have 1GB RAM, but surely that's enough to make it run smoothly, it was certainly never an issue with OS 10.4.

stevo-m said:

I've read some other messages posted here about people experiencing a significant delay in startup and in launching certain applications since installing Leopard, which I suppose to some extent is to be expected, however my MacBook Pro has slowed down dramatically, from startup to shut down (both of which take at least four or five times as long as they used to). Before I installed Leopard, my computer operated really quickly and I had no lag at all. Now it takes quite a while even for Firefox to start up or for a window to open when I double click a folder's icon. Does anyone know any way I can fix this? I don't understand why it would be so slow. I only have 1GB RAM, but surely that's enough to make it run smoothly, it was certainly never an issue with OS 10.4.

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The amount of memory you have does not have a direct correlation with system speed. If you are routinely dipping into virtual memory, that can slow down your system - and therefore, adding more physical memory can give the appearance of "adding" speed. If speed is a problem during startup or shutdown (when no programs are running), it's not a memory related problem as Leopard can run quite comfortably in 1GB of RAM by itself.

My guess would be that you have 3rd party programs running that might not be fully Leopard complaint. Have you checked your Login Items to see what's starting up at boot time? Did you do a clean install or a basic upgrade? Most people report far better success with a clean or archive & install.

cwa107 said:

The amount of memory you have does not have a direct correlation with system speed. If you are routinely dipping into virtual memory, that can slow down your system - and therefore, adding more physical memory can give the appearance of "adding" speed. If speed is a problem during startup or shutdown (when no programs are running), it's not a memory related problem as Leopard can run quite comfortably in 1GB of RAM by itself.

My guess would be that you have 3rd party programs running that might not be fully Leopard complaint. Have you checked your Login Items to see what's starting up at boot time? Did you do a clean install or a basic upgrade? Most people report far better success with a clean or archive & install.

Click to expand...

Cheers for your reply. I have now done an 'archive and install', and have noticed that the speed is pretty much okay when I'm using my machine generally, however the start-up and shut-down procedures still take a lot longer than they ever did while I was using Tiger. I've looked at my Login Items and they are:

- FontExplorerXAutoload
- Microsoft AU Daemon
- iTunesHelper
- System Events
- GrowlMenu

I'm not sure if I can safely delete any of these. I did have Mail starting up automatically, which again was fine when I was using Tiger, but I removed it to see if it was what was causing the problem, and it hasn't made much difference.

Any help appreciated! It just seems a lot slower than it should be. The whole start-up used to take about fifteen seconds and now it's taking a good couple of minutes, sometimes more, by the time all the whirring stops and all my desktop icons, menu bar, dock etc finally appear.

I would think cwa has it right on the money when he says it could be caused by apps not entirely Leopard-compatible.

Just looked at the Growl forums and there are things on their end to update.

Same thing for FontExplorer X, here and here.

iTunes has been updated not too long ago (yesterday or the day before, perhaps?) so it should be ok.

Microsoft AU Daemon... isn't this part of Office 2004? It isn't a Universal Binary.

So those might be slowing down the performance.