Speeding Up OSX Lion (Quick Tip That Works)

Like many of us, i was really frustrated when i installed Lion because it was much slower than Snow Leopard. After a little research i found a tip on the Apple Support page that does exactly what you need to have Lion running exactly how its supposed to.

1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities Folder and click on the Macintosh HD on the left.
2. Click Verify Disk on the Right
3. Next, click Repair Disk (not even sure this is needed because it should say "Volume OK" or something like that, but i did it anyway.
4. That's it!

The whole process should only take about 4 minutes tops.


That's it. Fullscreen apps are fast and smooth, Safari Zooms, and gestures and all the great things they promise work exactly the way they're supposed to. Even Time Capsule backups are quicker.

Figured i'd share this because it makes a huge difference and completely gets rid of all the lag issues.

Your alternate choice was a little harsh, but this is not a universal fix that applies to all users.

It might well work for people who haven't been doing their routine maintenance, however, and I'm glad it worked for you, but really if you're not doing some minimum level of maintenance every now and again you're asking for trouble. Macs don't need ANYTHING CLOSE to the level of maintenance that PCs do, but that doesn't mean they don't need ANY.

PS. The entire "verify disk" step is entirely unnecessary and always has been. If you want to repair the disk, just press repair disk.

what else would you recommed to speed up Lion? This was the only really quick tip i've found that worked.

Get a SSD. That will speed up Lion. Turn off unnecessary start up items. Maybe replace your HDD since it seems to be damaged, and damaged drives perform much slower than undamaged drives.

None of thee apply solely to lion, though. They're tips for all computers, all OSes. Lion is a speedy OS. It's faster than Snow Leopard, which was faster than Leopard. Tiger was probably the sleekest version of OS X, in terms of performance and size, but you lose out on most of the features of Leopard and newer. Still, repair disk permissions, and maybe run the apple hardware test to see if your HDD is dying (back up first).

I find Lion extremely zippy -- very much noticeably more so than SL -- and I'm running on old hardware (2007 Blackbook that barely even qualifies to run it). This new Safari in particular just FLIES, and Lion even corrected some iPhoto graphics glitches I was having in SL.

I should note, however, that I'm using (and was using under SL) 3GB of RAM (the most this model will take).

I found a load of errors on my disk, prompting me to restart from the recovery partition Loin had made. Disk repaired, back in action but I can't say I've noticed any speed difference, I don't think I had any slow issues in the first place but I feel happy in the belief that I've repaired some broken hard drive file links or whatever.

jdeep82 said:

what else would you recommed to speed up Lion? This was the only really quick tip i've found that worked.

Click to expand...

A clean install (i.e. not an upgrade of an existing install) made a big difference for me.

Also, whenever you do an OS X upgrade, you should be doing some basic maintenance (as well as a backup) ahead of the upgrade. This includes using something like "AppFresh" to ensure that all of your installed apps are up-to-date.

If you just do a straight upgrade without giving any thought to the current state of the system, you're just begging for trouble.

cwa107 said:

A clean install (i.e. not an upgrade of an existing install) made a big difference for me.

Also, whenever you do an OS X upgrade, you should be doing some basic maintenance (as well as a backup) ahead of the upgrade. This includes using something like "AppFresh" to ensure that all of your installed apps are up-to-date.

If you just do a straight upgrade without giving any thought to the current state of the system, you're just begging for trouble.

Click to expand...

I have not clean install, but bought a MacBook Pro (quad core) few days ago with Lion installed and wow... It starts up in 25 secs and shuts down in a sec or less. And of course, everything works at the speed of light, contrary to my Mac Pro (octo-core).

There are probably other implications, such as the amount of RAM and frequency speed, type of hard disk (I think is an SSD on the MBP), etc. However, SL is faster than the ****. No doubts about that.

PD: H ell is a bad word? C'mon... It's censored on the Bible too!? xD