Macbook pro

I have a MACBook Pro - 4 G RAM 2.4 GHZ Intel - It seems to load very slowly - a lot slower than my previous HP laptop which had less Ram. Are there switches or software controls that I need to tweek to gain speed. I am new to MAC. Thank you.

You may have a bunch of apps open.. OS X close vs QUIT are 2 different things.

Check in your Activity Monitor to see what is eating up RAM or processes. For a Quick look at all the open and running apps you can also just Press Command+Tab... tap TAB while holding down Command, to rotate through them.. Keep holding Command and press Q with it to quit a particular app.

Thanks - only thing open is SAFARI and System profiler. Also looked at Activity Monitor - no great usages being recorded.

Thanks again.

When you say "load" are you talking about a specific app that is slow to open the first time? Or maybe the MBP is slow to boot/reboot?

hurlcres scare

The MBP is slow to react and load initial screens.

Hmmm.. not sure why that would be... how old is the machine? Maybe run some Maintanence apps like Onyx.

ragurkis said:

The MBP is slow to react and load initial screens.

Click to expand...

Extreme slowness could also be a sign that the hard drive is going bad. I'm not sure how old your MBP is...but the older...the greater the chance of a HD failure.

Have you run Disk Utility to see what your HD's S.M.A.R.T. status is?

HTH,

- Nick

MBP is less than 6 months old -- ran disk utility - says drive OK - has 320G available only 36.8 used. Biggest problems seem to occur when I run game apps like POGO or others -- Java is current SE6.

Thank you again for all your suggestions - it does help me learn faster.

ragurkis said:

The MBP is slow to react and load initial screens.

Click to expand...

If it's always been like this then it's probably because the hard drive you got is the slow default one. Some people say there isn't a difference between a 5400 RPM drive but I noticed the difference when I upgraded to a 7200 RPM drive and of course a SSD will be even faster.

Try going to your Energy Saver setting in your System Preference and uncheck the "put the hard drive to sleep when possible". The time it takes for your hard to wake from sleep combined with a slower 5400 RPM drive will cause a noticeable lag. Unchecking the sleep option will cause a little more wear on your hard drive and reduce your battery run time but it might be a worthy trade-off for you. It won't speed up your hard time. It will just eliminate the extra time it takes to wake from sleep so you should notice some overall speed increase.

If the hard drive has only been recently slow then Nick is correct in that it could be a sign of a dying hard drive.

RiDE said:

When you say "load" are you talking about a specific app that is slow to open the first time? Or maybe the MBP is slow to boot/reboot?

Click to expand...

@ragurkis,

Don't discount "RIDE's" question so quickly. When you launch an application the first time...or if it's been a long time (weeks or months) since you last launched the application...it takes longer.

For example. If you launch Microsoft Excel for the first time it may take like 30-40 seconds. But if you immediately quit Excel & open it a 2nd time...it launches/opens much quicker. I think that it's due to creating "temp" files, caching some info, creating preference files, etc.

As far as booting/rebooting. I find that if I haven't restarted/rebooted my computer for a long time (just put it to sleep when I'm done)...when I finally do reboot the computer...the hard drive continues to "chug away" for a while (minutes) after the booting is done...because I think that the system is doing some sort of maintenance.

- Nick