mac book pro upgrade made the performace worse

I

indianiec

Registered
Hi,

I have a 3 years old MacBook Pro and just recently i did an upgrade to 3 Gb RAM (from 2 Gb) and new internal hard drive -sata 500 GB - 5400 RPM (from an old 160 Gb), which was supposed to speed up the work of my computer.

Unfortunately, i don't see much improvement. Instead my mac seem to work even worse than before:

-when editing in FCP, the playback starts sometimes with a delayed response, even 3 sec sometimes, which can drive every editor crazy. I tested this behavior and noticed that the delay is cyclical: it doesn't happen every time i click play, but every once in a while in a very regular pattern (like i click play and stop, play and stop, and the delay will happen every ten clicks of play )

-when using the internet, strange things happen as well. When watching online video, for example, youtube, the video will freeze for a few second once a while, even if it is fully loaded in the viewer.
-Also, even now when I am typing this info, sometimes the screen appearance of what i am typing is freezing (i.e. it freezes but after second the typed characters appear one by one in fast motion). It never happened to me before.

-similarly operations in finder freeze once a while (like scrolling, activating programs etc.)

-the drive also gives sounds similar to the ocean wave: the hum fades in and out once a while. I didn't experience it with my old drive, and it is totally independent from the cooling fan sound.

Has anyone had similar experience with MacBooksPro upgrades?
I want to add that I did the upgrade with the authorized Mac service, didn't touch anything myself. I would like to know your opinion before go back there, since I don't quite trust these guys.

Thank you,

Indianiec
 
Sorry, forgot to add:
The drive has two partitions. I work on the partition with Mac OS X 10.4.9 installed.
FCP version is 6.0, and it worked well before the upgrade (the partition i work on is an exact clone of my old drive)
 
Maybe doing the updates from 10.4.9 to 10.4.11 might help. Who cloned the drive and restored it to the new drive, you or the service provider? Have you ran permissions repairs or verified the disk in disk utility?
 
Thank you for your reply.

I have no idea what they did. they performed all the replacement, partition and cloning.

I verified disk using Onyx, it said all was OK.
I am testing now how the whole thing works under Leopard 10.5.6 (restarted the comp from another partition). I haven't tested FCP yet, but the internet and finder seems working a bit better (although there are still some glitches and the beachball is showing occasionally when I am typing this)
The drive uneven hum seems to be lower.

I did some research in the forum in the meantime, and found a posting where someone was complaining about SATA drives compatibility with OS X. Could that be an issue?
 
p.s.: the reason why i needed to do partition is that I have on 10.4.9 a software that is no longer supported and will not run on higher versions.
 
You sound like a knowledgeable user and may have already ruled this out, but... Could it be that Spotlight is still indexing? How long have you had the thing since the upgrade?
 
Thank you, but I am not too knowledgeable :)
I have used the upgraded computer for 3 days only. Is there a chance that the problems will go away? Is the uneven hum a normal thing? i don't even mind beachball during typing, for me the most important is the playback, I work with playback buttons all the time during editing, all has to be very fast, and 3 sec delay is not acceptable for me.
 
The beachball could be a lot of things. But running 10.4.9 when the latest updates to 10.4.11 is a probable cause of issues and would logically be the obvious and easiest step to troubleshoot the issue. You can't go and blame the service provider if you are unwilling to install updates that are meant to improve stability and security. Maybe you should have considered a 7200RPM drive as opposed to 5400RPM if you are concerned with playback times.
 
As i already stated earlier, I CAN'T upgrade to 10.4.11, since i don't have 2200$ to spend for the software upgrade that I would be forced to do afterwards (Avid Express to Avid Composer). I am just looking for a compromise. The drive i had before was fine, i just needed more space. If the SATA is in conflict with this system, I wonder what other drive would work.
 
I am sorry, but I don't think you read my post carefully (or maybe i didn't express myself clearly). I was talking about AVID upgrade, not system upgrade.
 
Well what brand of ram did you put in? The whats the speed of it? Alot of times, speeds can be interchanged. so you may have up'd your ram amount, but slowed your speed down.
 
Thank you for your reply.
I checked the info but i cannot find the brand info. It was installed by authorized mac service, so I am going to ask them. They offered to replace the drive, which is good, but if there are other issues, my computer is out of warranty already.
Is there a way to check the memory performance in the Activity Monitor or other programs?
Also I don't think this is a system version issue. I have the same problems when i run Leopard on my other partition. The most annoying thing is delayed typing, apart from playback and window scrolling problems.

Many thanks to all who want to give some input on this.
 
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