I HATE APPLE

WHY'S MY FUCKING MBP SO SLOW

this is a four GB ram / 2.66 ghz model. it was almost top of the top of the line just three years ago. now what?

i'm just trying to run a safari, pages, mail, itunes and ical at the same time. and newsfire and ichat. and things and omnifocus. i don't even have illustrator and numbers or keynote open.

so why's this thing so fucking slow? is i7 so much better than core 2 duo? is a 3MB L3 cache that much better than an 6MB L2 cache?

― moonship journey to baja, Tuesday, October 26, 2010 8:42 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

THIS

read on...

"my computer is slow" is the worst possible complaint. What exactly is slow. Safari suffers from Flash and you can help immensely but installing Click to Flash and whitelisting your fav. sites that use Flash. You can't just say your computer is slow. Is it the internet? Is it app switching? Have you opened Activity Monitor and looked at what's going on? Open Terminal and type Top. What's using the most %CPU? Have you run a disk check? How much free HD space do you have? Please provide actual information. There's no reason a machine with 4GB of RAM should be running slow with the apps you've described unless one of them has a memory leak or you're misinterpreting slow internet/flash problems for your whole machine being slow. also, what view are you using for iTunes? if you use CoverFlow it eats a shit ton of RAM. Check Activity Monitor when it 'runs slow' or open Terminal and type 'top' and see what apps are gobbling your bits.

what he said, especially ClickToFlash

Chrome users should install FlashBlock

You totally can just say your computer is slow!

It does seem to happen with Macs of a certain age, too. Whenever I've experienced it, it's been I/O based, not CPU -- almost like it was swapping something fierce.

I can't remember exactly how the on-the-fly defragmentation works in OS X, but there must be some limit to it. Backing up and reinstalling helps a lot, even on SSDs, as OS X doesn't have TRIM support yet.

jesus did you people read the following posts? We discovered it was mostly fonts and now he's a bit happier. Case closed.

yeah i trimmed back to 37 GB free disk space and down to ~100 fonts from almost 1500 and it's a lot zippier, particularly w/ internet and iwork. iphoto is still slow. thinking of upgrading the HD to 500 gb with 4 gb cache AND the SSD as boot partition trick, too.

I was about to post something else but instead I'll post that I hate how iPad Safari's habit of reloading pages when you return to them from another page is fucking annoying when it means you lose anything you had typed in a form (like this one) without warning. I understand it's to save having to store things in memory. Welll just give it a bit more RAM you cheap fuckers. I only had this page and Gmail open. I've had far too many stuttering YouTube videos of late too.

jesus did you people read the following posts? We discovered it was mostly fonts and now he's a bit happier. Case closed.
--dan selzer

We're talking about sunny's mac now

stuttering youtubes are maybe a sign of a slow connection? haven't had that at all xp

it's a sign that you are using the flash plugin and should enable youtube's "experimental" html5 video mode imo

Even better get the html5 YouTube plugin for safari -- much more reliable than google's version

been sparsely trying out dropbox but i'd like to start using it more seriously - could people describe their routine and how they combine dropbox with timemachine?

― licorice oratorio (baaderonixx), Thursday, October 28, 2010 2:53 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

This. Well, not the Time Machine part. How do you easily backup using Dropbox? Do you just manually copy from your hd to Dropbox each time you change something, or each day? Or is there a way to automate this that you use?

When you install Dropbox it creates a dropbox directory somewhere on your computer (you choose), which is synced to the dropbox website behind the scenes. Just move/keep any file you want backing up in there.

dropbox is just another idisk

not a time machine, if that helps

don't even think of it as another disk. it's a folder. anything you put in the folder is magically copied every time it changes.

So I should use that Dropbox folder as my main documents folder? Or do I just copy my documents folder each day to that folder? The latter sounds annoying since I only change a few things each day, but have a pretty sizable documents folder.

simplest approach is to put the dropbox folder inside your documents and *move* as much as you want into there.

the free account has a 2gb limit btw

Right, & you mean move as often as I want to backup, so that this isn't automated.

Which is fine! I need to get back to ~~~cloud~~~ backup. I just want to know if there's some automated step here that I'm missing.

no, i don't think you get it. it's just a folder on your computer. you keep stuff in it like any other folder.

but it has special properties in that anything that there is an up to date copy of anything you keep in this folder. you don't need to do anything (apart from be online) for this to happen.

it's totally install-and-forget. any backup thing that isn't is nearly pointless.

I get that: so it becomes the folder that I save stuff to. What's the risk that dropbox is gonna fry that folder?

zero.

cool, on it

stuttering youtubes are maybe a sign of a slow connection? haven't had that at all xp

― dayo, Friday, 29 October 2010 11:47

Well it's an 8Mb/s connection and the video plays fine on my MacBook.

it's a sign that you are using the flash plugin and should enable youtube's "experimental" html5 video mode imo

― mh, Friday, 29 October 2010 15:17

Well this is weird. I'm signed up to html5 on my Mac but I thought that seeing as the iPad doesn't have Flash support at all then any YouTube videos I was seeing automatically must not be Flash. I mean, it was launching the dedicated YouTube app. It neither worked without pausing every few seconds on that, or in a page with video embedded.

But I just went to youtube.com and forced it into html5 there, and sure enough, it works OK! So thanks for that. Don't really understand why it worked but it did.

Even better get the html5 YouTube plugin for safari -- much more reliable than google's version

― stet, Friday, 29 October 2010 15:48

Can you explain? I didn't even know you could install plug-ins on iPad Safari.

This was the video, btw, if anyone is interested (most YouTube videos have been fine)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXbCwq4ewBU

I've been watching 15 min long starcraft 2 replays on youtube via ipad. and I have a corny iphone 3g tethered internet connection which I'm sharing via my macbook. so I dunno

I was wondering if it was because it's HD.

that could be it. I didn't know you could select res on the youtube app, the standard 480p looks fine on mine

Thanks for checking it out. I didn't select HD, it's just that I see an HD version is available, so maybe it's trying to play that in the YouTube app for some reason. Actually it doesn't look that HD before it starts stuttering, so maybe not. Anyway, avoiding the YouTube app seems to now make it work, so I'll stop fretting about it.

You can't install plugins on iPad safari, no, just Mac. But it's great there.

Interesting about using the html5 version -- I've always preferred using the native app because it seems more reliable.

(sorry, thought the stuttering youtubes bit started on a MacBook, not your iPad! That browser thing drives me nuts, too. iCab seems a lot better at handling it, though -- saves tabs to disks if memory low)

i bought a HD enclosure to see if i could access the broken HD. i broke it within five seconds of opening the box.

i plugged my ipod in to sync it. i clicked "cancel" on a box saying it was already synced to another computer because i didn't know which was the right thing to do and now that box won't come up again and it won't sync. moreover, last.fm has not acknowledged it.

why is every. single. step of this shit so trying? why can't things JUST FUCKING WORK FOR ONCE LIKE THEY'RE MEANT TO. i'm so demoralised about all of this.

also google chrome won't work on 10.4.11 and i'd forgotten just how much of the firefox experience is spent glaring at a spinning beachball

and i'd forgotten my old itunes problem whereby it has to think and the beachball has to spin for 5 secs before playing certain random mp3s

dropbox is just another idisk

...for nothing left to lose.

Good luck USA for next week:

iPhone users could well be rolling into the office an hour late today across Europe. A bug affecting Apple’s handset’s alarm has hit after clocks went back one hour at the weekend.

The fault means that although the phone’s clock will automatically step back one hour to account for daylight saving time, the alarm sticks to its previous time. The result? Lots of people getting up an hour late.

hard drive in parents' 4 1/2 yr old mac mini died, apple are charging for parts only (£60), pretty good i think

lol just realized my powerbook doesn't have an expresscard slot anyway.. BUH

gah my airport express network has gotten so shitty this weekend. DO NOT UNDERSTAND. i have literally tried everything :(

Bluetooth interference? I just started having this problem.

Buy a microwave? New cordless phone? Baby monitor?

http://www.istumbler.net/

install that. see if there are networks in your range that are using the same channel. check to see what the other stats look like. change channels if necessary.

you can also check other area wifi networks by pressing option and clicking your airport icon in the menu bar. mouse over the other network names and see if one near you is on the same channel. could be causing the trouble.

i already tried everything

only thing that seems to be working is occasionally changing the channel. must just be crazy interference around here

gah my airport express network has gotten so shitty this weekend. DO NOT UNDERSTAND. i have literally tried everything :(

― candid gamera (s1ocki), Monday, November 1, 2010 4:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

omg mine did too, i think its back on ok but maybe there was a "virus" going around--get it

I used to love Apple products when I was a teenager but since converting to the more universal Windows OS in 2003 or so I feel as if I've grown out of them. They're too easy to use, so the OS gets boring. I like to tinker on my hardware so bringing my gadgets to the Apple Store and paying for Apple Care isn't something that thrills me. There are also cooler phones and music players out there if you're willing to look hard enough(Creative Labs, where is my Zen Touch Phone? GET ON IT!).
Apple is cool if you're into ease of use for various reasons, but I don't think it's convenient for the rest of us that are constantly surrounded by Microsoft-based operating systems in our everyday lives and need to move our data across platforms. Windows is still the dominant OS in public and I think Apple fanboys rag on it because the dominance of Windows inconveniences them and makes them butthurt.
Thankfully file conversion is getting easier due to the internet and open source applications, I think eventually Win and Mac are going to be able to work hand-in-hand and it won't make a damn difference because it will all be the same crap, just a different OS skin. Actually, we're getting to that point already.

mine eyes have seen the glory