Leopard Problems

Colm_OReilly

Hi,

I bought and installed Leopard at Christmas for my MacBook, which was bought the previous Christmas.

I noticed my Mac was running slower, didn't think this would be the case with a machine only a year old. Here's the spec btw from the order confirmation.

2.00GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM-2x1GB
200GB Serial ATA @ 4200 rpm
Superdrive 6x
No Modem
No Optional Software
None
Keyboard/Mac OS-B
Country Kit-GBR

Internet was particularly slow, not just with firefox but with safari as well. I notice the internet more because I'm online mostly. To the point where pages would hang indefinitely or I had to click links 3/4 times to get a page to load.

Foolishly last night I threw in the Tiger install disc, and wiped all my documents/movies/music. But still, internet seems slow (am using ntl 3.0MB package, and AirTunes).

So my questions are:
Can my Mac handle Leopard?
Is there a way of "formatting" or cleaning up my mac myself or do I need to bring it in somewhere to get tidied up?
Is there a way of putting all the music on my iPod back on iTunes or do I need to start downloading again? (Can I get back my iTunes Store purchases?)

Any other tips, or should I send Mr. Jobs an email expressing how dejected I am at this. I really do love Macs.

Thanks,
Colm

merkuree

You have asked many questions here.

I will address the one which I have had personal experience with.

Apple will allow you to re-download your prior itunes purchases (one time only) by contacting them through the link on your itunes account page. This generally takes 24 hours or so to organize and however long it takes to download your purchases.

merkuree

As regards the spec of your machine, you should have no problem running Leopard......it should run well on that machine.....you have plenty of RAM and a speedy processor.

If the only symptom of 'slowness' that you are seeing is slow internet access, it may be just that your feed to the internet is slow.

Not sure if you are running DSL or cable, but you mention NTL which I believe is cable. Cable is a shared access medium which means that the availability of the bandwidth depends on how many folks are using your cable segment in your area.

Plus, do not know from your post whether you are using wireless access in your home but you do mention airtunes.....do you mean airport express? If so, it may be that your wireless base station is configured to run at a lower throughput than 11Mbps.

Either way, your laptop, based on the spec provided should run Leopard without an issue.

If you do not see any slowness in the machine when you boot up, or when you open an application.....and the latency only occurs when you are connecting to the net, I would first suspect that your cable/dsl/wireless connection may be the culprit sooner than blame the OS as the source of your issue.

Hope that helps you out a little.

triple h

yeah, your macbook is good enough to run Leopard. I reckon it's an internet speed problem. like what merkuree said above.

Here is how to get your songs into itunes, also go into youtube to find out, you might see a video demo.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/copying-music-from-ipod-to-computer/

Sad Professor

As said above you need to establish if the problem is with the system or with your internet connection. When you say it hangs do you mean the browser itself hangs or just the connection? Safari's hangs are usually accompanied by a spinning beach-ball and frozen interface. But if pages are simply loading slowly that implies a problem with your connection.

How did you install Leopard first day? Upgrade or clean install?

When you say you put in the Tiger discs and wiped your documents do you mean you did a clean install of Tiger? Has anything improved since you did this?

In what way is the internet slow? Web browsing? Downloads? When did this problem start?

Colm_OReilly

Thanks for the responses so far guys.

I'm using Airport express. downloads through torrents seem fine enough, I understand they vary wildly based on the tracker and all that but I was getting good DL speeds on them. My brother is also accessing the base station through his PC with a belkin yokey. But he was doing this before I started noticing problems.

Originally, (essentially day one of the install) it seemed slower (the whole system). Firefox itself crashed everytime I went into either Finder or Preview (is that the name of the pdf viewer?)

This stopped after a week or so I think.

I believe I did an upgrade to Leopard. When it upgraded I'd all my files there if that counts for anything.

For Tiger, it asked me if I wanted to create a separate folder named "Previous System" before installation, which I did. I installed Tiger late last night. I'm unsure if it's improved performance since I've no movies/music/docs/pics/torrents to open and see if it slows down again.

Thanks for the help so far guys. Do you think it would be a good idea to upgrade again to Leopard?

Is there anything else I can do to get my Mac back up to the impressible fast speeds it originally had?

Cheers,
Colm

Sad Professor

Colm_OReilly wrote: »

For Tiger, it asked me if I wanted to create a separate folder named "Previous System" before installation, which I did. I installed Tiger late last night. I'm unsure if it's improved performance since I've no movies/music/docs/pics/torrents to open and see if it slows down again.

This is called an Archive and Install. Your documents should still be there, perhaps you just didn't tell it to port them over. Have a look in the Previous System folder > Users, etc

If installing Leopard again do another Archive and Install, not an upgrade. That may have caused your problems in the first place. But I'd wait until you've sorted everything else out first.

Type 17

Apart from doing an Archive and Install* rather than an Upgrade, you need to allow for the fact that spotlight (and perhaps other apps, such as Time Machine, etc) take a few days (in my experience) to optimise/index themselves, and you may find that for the first few days/week (depending on your usage), Leopard is slower than Tiger was, but it does get faster.

This was my experience on a 2.4 GHz/2GB RAM iMac, and I said nothing to my wife about it, but she complained of the same syndrome on her 2.0GHz/1.7GB MacBook when I upgraded it later on.

*Remember to tick the "Preserve Users and Settings" tickbox, or you'll lose your details and docs.

Sad Professor

Type 17 wrote: »

you need to allow for the fact that spotlight (and perhaps other apps, such as Time Machine, etc) take a few days (in my experience) to optimise/index themselves, and you may find that for the first few days/week (depending on your usage), Leopard is slower than Tiger was, but it does get faster.

A good point which I was going to mention. I think it's a common problem new users have especially in the case of Spotlight indexing. I don't think it likes being interrupted either and if the database gets screwed up it can sometimes go nuts and keep indexing forever which can cause a big slow down. Notebook users in particular probably close their lids before it has a chance to finish.

Some 3d-party background apps don't always behave either. Everyone should install iStat pro or keep an eye on Activity Monitor for over-active CPU processes.

Colm_OReilly

Luckily, my old docs etc were in the previous system folder (phew!).

Internet seemed to pick up speed again last night so maybe I'll try install Leopard later in the week. Is there any diagnostic/clean up tools as part of the OS that can improve the machines performance?

Is there anywhere in Dublin I can bring the MacBook to have it looked at? Or do I need to ship it down to Cork?

Thanks for the help so far guys,
Col

Type 17

Disk Utility can do a basic cleanup (permissions), but when installing Leopard, the cleanest way to do it (without having to back up your stuff before formatting the hard drive) is to do an Archive & Install - you'll get a fresh system structure, rather than an old one with some new files shoved into it.

Apple resellers like Mactivate or Typetec can look at your Mac in Dublin, if required, but if you give it to them and tell them it's slow, they'll just re-load the system (which you can do for free yourself), or they might try and sell you more RAM (you have enough at 2GB, unless you are doing a lot of heavy video/graphics/photo editing).

I'd do an A & I up to Leopard, and wait for a few days (4-6) for it to settle down.
Also I'd recommend installing Menumeters so you can keep an eye on netork activity vs. CPU activity when using the Mac, so you can see if it's the system or your ISP that is slowing things down.

Also note that the Spotlight magnifying glass symbol in the Menubar has a flashing dot in the centre of it when it is indexing the contents of your drive (first few days after migrating the system).