slow new Macbook Pro

Hi ,

I just bought a new Macbook Pro 2011 model in Taiwan and its REALLY SLOW!! especially when I use Photoshop and Lightroom which is the main reason why I bought this computer.

Any advice on how to speed it up would be great!!

Thank you !

CC

How much RAm is installed and how much free hard disk space is left

Those programs, especially LR, can bog the system while they get their libraries set up.

I have a 4GB RAM and a LOT of free space.

What do you think is wrong?

CC

candicecurzai said:

I have a 4GB RAM and a LOT of free space.

What do you think is wrong?

CC

Click to expand...

LR and some other photo programs create multiple copies of many large image files and associated editing information.

Run Activity Monitor in Applications/Utilities to see what is tying up your system.

Sometimes LR can need many, many hours of indexing and processing. After that things normalize. If that is what is happening, Activity Monitor will help you spot it.

Activity monitor screen shot

Here s the activity monitor screen shot , hope this helps to understand my problem better!
Maybe lightroom 4 is taking a while to process but I installed it 10 days ago and it was working fine when I installed it but it has slowed down a lot since then !


Thank you so much !!

CC

Thats a high page in/out do you have other apps open at the same time.

I have lightroom and photoshop open at the same time, along with safari and sometimes i tunes... shouldnt the macbook be able to handle all this?

candicecurzai said:

I have lightroom and photoshop open at the same time, along with safari and sometimes i tunes... shouldnt the macbook be able to handle all this?

Click to expand...

Your apps are using up all of your ram and then some. Hence the huge amount of swapping. Your mac is using your hard drives as additional ram, and they are much slower as you have noticed.

You can try tweaking those programs for increased efficiency (check various photo forums and not mac forums for that). It's more of an app issue than a mac issue in other words. You might think about snapping in some more memory (cheap).

Does anyone write tight code anymore. ;-(

RAM upgrade would definitely fix this! Not sure how much your MBP can take, but it's probably pretty cheap to max out and will solve your issues.

dekan said:

RAM upgrade would definitely fix this! Not sure how much your MBP can take, but it's probably pretty cheap to max out and will solve your issues.

Click to expand...

Yeah LR seems to desire at least 6 gb or more. Think about that. To process some images that are way, way smaller…it nearly has to take over your whole laptop. Not very efficient really.

Think about the early PC days…IBM XT came with what…a 5 or 10 mb hard drive. And you could run a small company on it. Now one photo is larger than that, and it can tie up a laptop worlds faster, with multiple cores, 64 instead of 8 or 16 bits, yada yada...

thank you very much !

So will an 8 GB RAM suffice or should I get the 12GB

What about increasing the SSD ?

And how much will this cost?

Will it be better to get it done from a computer store or go to an apple store?

Thank you
CC

more info

Heres some more information about my mac if it helps!

CC

Go to crucial and let it scan your system and it will give you options on both the ram and HD but unless I am mistaken you can max out at 16g.

What osxx is advising is to visit crucial.com, a RAM dealer.

If you're going to use Photoshop and Lightroom, I would suggest you get as much RAM as you can afford. Both of these programs like as much RAM as you can give them.

Thank you! Ive checked on crutial and it suggests a 16 GB RAM too ...

I think ive found the solution to my slow mac

= )

CC