Lion Was Slow After Upgrade *BUT*

I popped the retail DVD in, while I was running Snow Leopard; went through the upgrade and the machine was noticeably slower.

However, after my winter class ended, I wiped the drive and installed from scratch.
It's a lot faster.

I don't know what the deal is, but could the complaints people have about Lion's sluggishness have something to do with the upgrade process, as opposed to installing onto a blank drive?

I have a 15" Mid 2009 MBP.

I have to say this happened to me too, I upgraded from SL and it was slow as molasses, then I did a clean install, and the results were the same, so I came back to SL. Two weeks ago, I updated SL and the difference was noticeable, Lion is so much faster and stable now!! The first time it took like 45sec to boot, now it's just 23 secs, and mine is a White MB, mid-2010, with no hardware upgrades.

TechieJustin said:

I popped the retail DVD in, while I was running Snow Leopard; went through the upgrade and the machine was noticeably slower.

Click to expand...

Just for clarity...if you're talking about a "Lion retail DVD"...there is no such "animal"!

Lion OS available formats:

- USB Stick (yes)
- Downloadable (yes)
- Make your own bootable DVD (yes)
- Retail DVD (no)

- Nick

Yes it is true that it is slower doing the upgrade. A lot of people that do upgrade are building them on top of each other. I am sure some of the people running lion are running it on a computer that originally shipped with leopard or even tiger. It really should not matter, but it does for some reason. I know that tiger and leopard are completely different OS, Snow Leopard was built off of Leopard, Lion Was built off of Snow Leopard, so alot of the "building blocks" of the os don't change from Leopard to Lion.

I have actually experienced it on my computers, I have an older MacBook (late 2007) and my MacBook Pro both running lion, I had to upgrade the MacBook Pro because I had 500GB of data on it and could not transfer it some where else becuase I decided to upgrade while on vacation. Where the MacBook I did not care for anything, so I did a clean install. The slower, older MacBook is much faster.

One note about purforming a clean install of lion is that apple does not support people doing that. They say the recovery partition will not install correctly, but works fine for me.

Your experience isn't unique by any means. A quick search of the forums will highlight this issue. I'm one of those people - Lion just crawled for me after an upgrade but was nimble (as much as it can be on my aging MB) after doing a fresh install. This is why I always recommend fresh installs regardless of what others might suggest.

Lion takes forever to boot on my MacBook, but my MacBook is from late 2007 -- probably the earliest that will run Lion...I think Lion is more for newer machines. I did an upgrade from Snow Leopard, not a clean install. (Too much hassle to do a clean install, seriously.)

Just got a mid-2011 iMac that came with SL. Upgraded that to Lion. (I could have done a clean install, but I just did the upgrade.) Lightning fast....

Lion will run just fine on that macbook, I have the same one and runs great, you just need to make sure there is enough RAM, I had to upgrade to 4GB.

As for upgrade I was not that clear, if if clean install orginal OS then upgrade all the way to Lion it should be just a good as a clean install. But if you start to use the computer begin to fill the drive install apps, then upgrade it runs terrible, the more use the worse it runs.

Also, the two computers you are comparing are in different "classes", the MacBook is a Core2Duo (second oldest supported by lion by the way), meaning dual core and originally ship with 1GB (lowest model). Where the iMac is a Quad i5 CPU and shipped with 4GB(lowest Model)

pigoo3 said:

Just for clarity...if you're talking about a "Lion retail DVD"...there is no such "animal"!

Lion OS available formats:

- USB Stick (yes)
- Downloadable (yes)
- Make your own bootable DVD (yes)
- Retail DVD (no)

- Nick

Click to expand...

That's what I mean, the install USB stick. But, I made a DVD from it just because I'm old school and don't trust flash RAM 100%.