Did Mountain Lion slow down your machine?

wfaissol said:

My iMac is so slow with this Mountainlion! It takes forever to open documents, access itunes store, even the internet is taking forever! And where the iMovie icon should be on the dock, there is a question mark. It's been 4 excrutiating days since I installed it, have I done anything wrong? I don't speak Mac, what is Spotlight? My computer is: iMac 24 inches, mid 2007, 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, OS X 10.8. Thanks so much!

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I doubt you could have done anything wrong with the install;
If you have a lot of files, deleting some of them could speed up your computer.

Spotlight is the built in search (the magnifying glass icon at the top right of the screen) - It indexes all of the documents on your computer so it can search them faster, but while it's indexing your computer goes painfully slow sometimes. I think after 4 days it should have finished (you can click the magnifying glass icon and somewhere it will say "indexing" in the drop down menu if it hasn't finished)

I have no idea what has caused the question mark on the dock for iMove; that appears when the program can't be found, have you done all the updates for iMovie if there is any?

Also, you should go into activity monitor to see what's using the most CPU and what's using the most RAM. You might find a program which is using lots of resources, if you do, close it and see if it speeds up your computer.
Hope I helped

mrplow said:

Then maybe a PRAM/SMC reset

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This helped me tremendously!! Feels so much healthier now.....I had went from Snow Leopard to Mountain lion and it just didnt feel good....felt sluggish. I am upgrading the RAM from 2 to 4 gigs today as well but the PRAM/SMC resetting worked great! Thanks!

wfaissol said:

My iMac is so slow with this Mountainlion! It takes forever to open documents, access itunes store, even the internet is taking forever! And where the iMovie icon should be on the dock, there is a question mark. It's been 4 excrutiating days since I installed it, have I done anything wrong? I don't speak Mac, what is Spotlight? My computer is: iMac 24 inches, mid 2007, 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, OS X 10.8. Thanks so much!

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Like I said above I had went from Snow Leopard to Mountain lion and it just didnt feel good....felt sluggish. I am upgrading the RAM from 2 to 4 gigs today as well but the PRAM/SMC resetting worked great! Look up on apple support site on how to do each, the PRAM reset and then the SMC reset

Also, Mountain Lion seems to not like just 2 GBs of RAM....RAM is so cheap nowadays especially in the speed you listed, I would recommend going up to at least 4 gigs

I seem to be one of the few who have suffered from Mountain Lion, I must have done something bad in my past?
Since downloading it, I have had terrible problems. It constantly freezes doing simple tasks, I have restarted my computer four times this evening after locking up and Force Quit wouldn't even open. It will not shut down, so I have to force it on the button, one night it was still running in the morning after Shut Down. It takes ages to restart, Numbers will not work so I have had to revert to Excel and Word on my laptop. I thought all these problems were behind me when I changed from Windows, which incidentally has run faultlessly since I bought it for taking away.
I am incidentally running a 2008 Mac Pro with 12 GB ram and four hard drives.
I have tried a PRAM restart which put me back to the original Leopard OS which ran fine and I am tempted to go back to that OS, as this is driving me mad. It didn't make any difference to Mountain Lion when I rebooted in it. I have tried a Disc Repair but it tells me the disc is fine, so I didn't do the repair. Incidentally the original OS is on a different HD to Mountain Lion.

Thanks so much guys! I clicked on the magnifying glass icon for the Spotlight and it doesnt say anything. I removed the iMovie from the doc and then put it there again and it's fine now. I want to see this CPU, how do I go into activity monitor? I'm going to look up how to reset this PRAM and SMC....
I thought I had 4G but I have only 2G. How do I buy some more?

You can purchase memory at any computer parts store or through various online distributors. Before you purchase it though, you need to make sure you buy the correct type of memory. In your last post, you mentioned that you have a mid 2007 iMac. If that is indeed the case, MacTracker notes that your machine takes PC2-5300 (667Mhz) DDR2 chips. Most online sites will let you specify the details so you can use that to search. If you go to a store, just ask a clerk to help.

One thing to keep in mind - you've got two slots for memory chips so don't buy four 1GB chips. If possible, try to use two 2GB chips (as opposed to one 4GB chip).

Will do! Thanks so much Vansmith! Also, how do I see the CPU thing?

Not sure what to do

I downloaded ML on the 25th and everything was okay until Tuesday. Everything started to become really slow especially Safari. A friend told me to use Chrome instead and that worked at first, but by the end of the day became super slow too. When I was in Activity Monitor the highest % was Activity Monitor and nothing else. I was reading other forums that said to just reinstall ML. It says it is downloading additional components and has about 94.5 hrs left and I have been doing this for an hour and a half. Does anyone know what these additional components are? I would greatly appreciate any help. Thank you.

wfaissol said:

Will do! Thanks so much Vansmith! Also, how do I see the CPU thing?

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If you're looking for Activity Monitor, it's in the Utilities folder that itself is located in the Applications folder.

Try not to obsess over the values in AM - it's easy to do so. Remember that your machine is five years old and it barely qualified for ML so the performance is likely to be worse than those of us with more modern machines.

Just started the download now. If I don't come back to post an update you know it didn't go well!

Mountain Lion has been running pretty well for me so far. The only problem I have experienced was a little after I installed it my macbook pro froze but I haven't had it happen anymore.

I definitely noticed a speed difference going from 4GB to 8GB with Lion on my Mac Mini... I can't imagine running Lion on just 2GB.

Rockin' Kat said:

I definitely noticed a speed difference going from 4GB to 8GB with Lion on my Mac Mini... I can't imagine running Lion on just 2GB.

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Yeah definitely. Hey should I be worried that my macbook pro froze after recently installing Mountain Lion. It hasn't done it anymore though.

Did MountainLion slow down

As mentioned previously I have an unworkable mac now I have added Mountain Lion, but as most of you guys are doing okay with it, I must have a problem. So if I reload ML onto a new HD how do I gain access to the download, I can not find it anywhere?

Everything works fine for me too. But the ML update has made my GTA IV stuttering too much and i cant even go ahead with the game rather than quitting it. Has anyone had this problem? Please help me out.

Thanks so much!

Mountain Lion Slow fixes that worked

I have a 2010 era MacBook Pro and a 2008 era MacPro that I installed Mountain Lion on and they both went into SLOOOOOOOW mode. I mean unusable. Horrible. I was thinking I would have to buy another machine to meet my deadlines I searched and found some fixes to try and here is what worked for me:

MacBookPro - definitely do the PRAM reset: Shutdown and startup holding down Command-Option-R-P until the rebook sound is heard twice. Now MBP works a lot better.

MacPro - Mountain Lion was slow because it was thrashing, or at least, there was a ton (40MB/sec it claimed) of Disk I/O. CPU mostly idle. I moved a lot of documents onto a USB drive so there was plenty of free disk space on the boot drive and my machine is usable again! Yea!!!!!!!!

I hope this helps those of you that were panic'd like me!

imac slow after ML upgrade

vansmith said:

Two things may be causing the perceived speed issues. First, as has been mentioned, Spotlight, when creating a new index, requires a lot of resources. It is trying to index quite a few files, many of which you probably don't use or see on a regular basis.

Second, operating systems generally tend to get larger and require more resources as time goes on. This is why system requirements never drop. As such, generally (but not always), software tends to put a greater strain on system resources.

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I upgraded to ML 5 days ago and that was after a fresh install of Snow Leopard. I have now gone back to Snow Leopard as my iMac was running so badly. Apart from being slow, if the mac went into hibernation(say overnight) the the internet required restarting several times before it found the router and worked. I have tried some of the suggestion on the forum and unfortunately none have worked. Very disappointing as all my previous upgrades have been well worth doing. I am experiencing a degree of deja vu from Microsoft Windows!!

Andy