OK, so I added memory... now what?

[Spartan John-117]

I posted in the past with concerns about speeding up my 13 inch MacBook Pro Mid-2009. I installed Mavericks and it SLOWED drastically. Today I received my memory from OWC and installed it (fully blown 8GB) and the boot times and shut down are still slow, but it doesn't take me 6 minutes to close out of iTunes. Is there anything else I can do, hardware or software wise? I was considering upgrading to a SSD, but not sure. Any advice would be great.

 

[Just_Me_D]

You have more than enough memory for OS X Mavericks. I have a MacBook early 2009 with 4 GB of RAM and Mavericks run well on it. I'm sure you know that more RAM means you can have more things open simultaneously without it bogging down the system. More memory will speed up performance to a degree, but it is only as fast as the slowest part. RAM, the display of graphics and the speed in which data is accessed all play a role in regard to performance. If you think that OS X Mavericks should be faster on your MacBook Pro, I recommend you install a faster hard drive, maybe even an SSD drive, if compatible. Before doing so, give your system a day or two to see how it performs.

 

[iHackPro]

An SSD will be a great performance booster, but even on a HDD, nothing should be drastically slow to where you are crawling.

 

[Spartan John-117]

An SSD will be a great performance booster, but even on a HDD, nothing should be drastically slow to where you are crawling.

It was that way before I upgraded the memory. I would close out of iTunes, and would have to force quit every time.

JustMe'D... That probably what I'll do is wait a few days before considering a SSD.

 

[Peter Cohen]

One thing I'd try is simply to run Disk Utility - preferably rebooting from your Mac's recovery partition - to see if there's anything wrong with the drive or the data that's on the drive. Partition map problems and other issues can slow the system down.

If it's feasible, it may even be a good idea to back up, reformat the drive, then restore (again, Recovery Partition, paired with a Time Machine backup, should be all you need).

I agree with the SSD advice, just on general principle. I've done that upgrade myself now twice - once on a late 2009 MacBook (white polycarbonate) and on a 2008 Mac Pro. In both cases, performance improved dramatically. It was a night and day difference. You don't realize how performance-constrained a Mac is by the hard drive until you replace it with SSD.

But in both cases, the SSD upgrade was made pre-Mavericks. I'm not aware of anything in Mavericks that would explain a dramatic slowdown post-upgrade, especially now that you've improved RAM.

 

[Jaguarr40]

I know we are talking about MAC here and SSD and I just converted to SSD with my desktop and went from 4 to 8 matching GB sticks of memory. The only reason I mentioned memory it that it is rather important to make sure you are matching memory and also in my case I installed 2 4 GB sticks of Crucial with a Crucial SSD 500 GB, Expensive but my god the boot time is incredible - about 4-5 secs and I am at my desktop ready to work.

 

[Jaguarr40]

One thing I'd try is simply to run Disk Utility - preferably rebooting from your Mac's recovery partition - to see if there's anything wrong with the drive or the data that's on the drive. Partition map problems and other issues can slow the system down.

If it's feasible, it may even be a good idea to back up, reformat the drive, then restore (again, Recovery Partition, paired with a Time Machine backup, should be all you need).

I agree with the SSD advice, just on general principle. I've done that upgrade myself now twice - once on a late 2009 MacBook (white polycarbonate) and on a 2008 Mac Pro. In both cases, performance improved dramatically. It was a night and day difference. You don't realize how performance-constrained a Mac is by the hard drive until you replace it with SSD.

But in both cases, the SSD upgrade was made pre-Mavericks. I'm not aware of anything in Mavericks that would explain a dramatic slowdown post-upgrade, especially now that you've improved RAM.

BTW good to see you on this side Peter - Keep the good stories coming.