Slow Performance

I can't understand why my MacBook is performing so slowly. I'm always seeing the spinning rainbow ball. It can take what seems like forever to switch between applications or even close a window. Any idea what's going on?

May I ask how much RAM you have installed? A MacBook with only 512Mb of RAM is cutting it close.

I have 512. My ibook only had 256, and it still runs better than this.

i have 1.25gb of ram and i see the spinning rainbow ball probably once day on safari

i have 2 gig of ram and my macbook runs flawlessly. very fast and no waiting/hangups. a big more stable now also.

Even the Macbook in the Apple store has 2 gig in it. I was surprised how fast it was. You only have 512.........................

for a period of time the mb (in store) all had 768 ram in them.

i cant see why apple would do that, max em out, make the customer see the performance.

Before I go out and spend $ on more RAM, is there anything else I can check to make sure my MacBook is configured for optimal performance? After all, I'm running all the same stuff on this computer as I did on my iBook which has even less Ram and I never had these kinds of problems with it.

Fiwi said:

Before I go out and spend $ on more RAM, is there anything else I can check to make sure my MacBook is configured for optimal performance? After all, I'm running all the same stuff on this computer as I did on my iBook which has even less Ram and I never had these kinds of problems with it.

Click to expand...

are you running the same operating system too? Tiger is very slow with only 512, but if you want to try to pick up onyx from versiontracker, it may increase performance, but not by alot.

You can also quit the Dashboard widgets if you don't use them. Each widget takes up about 5mb from your RAM.

Thanks for the advice. I installed Onyx and quite my widgets which has helped a little. I guess I've got to get more RAM. I didn't take into account the new operating system.

I was extremely dissappointed when i got my macbook. I thought it was too slow and i could only open one firefox tab and maybe text edit if i was lucky. After adding a gb to my 256 (initially had 512) so now i have 1.25 gbs... it has made a tremendous speed increase, in every aspect. Opening programs, amt of programs, restart time... just about everything. I can now have bittyrant, word, dictionary, limewire, firefox with a few tabs, and itunes with music playing all open, and i barely feel any sluggishness... I think i may add another gb, i can only imagine how nice the results would be with another gb.