Os 10.7

[Jimi007]

I had a system crash, so I installed 10.7. It seems really slow to me. And there are some programs that won't run on it. A friend that owns some Apple repair shops in the US told me it sucked! I am starting to agree. I have 4 GB RAM on my MacBook Pro and it worked fine with 10.6. I think I see why so many people have been asking about the 8 GB upgrades lately. I'm seriously thinking about going back to 10.6!

[nikster]

Works fine for me.

One thing about installing 10.7 is that the moment you start it up, it starts indexing your hard disks. This process can take hours depending on your disks, and it's using a LOT of CPU and hard disk bandwidth so during that time your system will be way slow. Use Activity Monitor to check which process is using the most CPU, so you can find stray programs.

For all the hype I don't think 10.7 a must have though - I like the new Mail.app - it finally got threaded views (like Gmail). But I never use the new mission control and have removed "launchpad" - launchpad on my system consists of 5 entire 1920x1200 screens full of icons - does that make launching apps fast? Certainly not.

And they made the Finder's side bar icons grey which is just stupid and much worse than before. Had to hack it to get some color back. The whole side bar is a major step backwards in usability.

There are other small improvements here or there but really nothing major. No issues with performance or memory though.

PS: Just remembered another *fantastic* feature in Lion: Preview now has a "sign" feature with which you can sign PDFs. It's cleverly using the built in camera to take a picture of your real signature, and inserts it into PDF documents. Very well done, seamless, and painless. I use this all the time. So this and the new Mail are the reasons to upgrade.

Edited December 14, 2011 by nikster

[Jimi007]

Works fine for me.

One thing about installing 10.7 is that the moment you start it up, it starts indexing your hard disks. This process can take hours depending on your disks, and it's using a LOT of CPU and hard disk bandwidth so during that time your system will be way slow. Use Activity Monitor to check which process is using the most CPU, so you can find stray programs.

For all the hype I don't think 10.7 a must have though - I like the new Mail.app - it finally got threaded views (like Gmail). But I never use the new mission control and have removed "launchpad" - launchpad on my system consists of 5 entire 1920x1200 screens full of icons - does that make launching apps fast? Certainly not.

And they made the Finder's side bar icons grey which is just stupid and much worse than before. Had to hack it to get some color back. The whole side bar is a major step backwards in usability.

There are other small improvements here or there but really nothing major. No issues with performance or memory though.

PS: Just remembered another *fantastic* feature in Lion: Preview now has a "sign" feature with which you can sign PDFs. It's cleverly using the built in camera to take a picture of your real signature, and inserts it into PDF documents. Very well done, seamless, and painless. I use this all the time. So this and the new Mail are the reasons to upgrade.

Maybe it was indexing. I had downloaded Adobe CS 5.5 and it was really slow after doing that. It seems better now. But I don't like that my hard drives don't mount to the desk top anymore and you have to go to Finder. Reminds me of Windows... I didn't like the new mail app at first either and I started to use Outlook. But I guess it's okay, it looks like the mail app on my iPad... I haven't needed to look at any pdf files since I installed 10.7, but that sounds kind of handy. Better than printing, signing the document and then scanning it... But no version of Pro Tools is out for 10.7 yet. I guess I'll play with it a while and decide. The one thing that pisses me off is I will have to reload all my music and apps into iTunes for both my iPad and iPod touch. My time machine HD failed a few weeks before my system crash, so I had to start from scratch. Seagate is sending me a free new external firewire drive this week, so after it arrives I'll decide what I want to do.

[bubba]

Works fine for me.

One thing about installing 10.7 is that the moment you start it up, it starts indexing your hard disks. This process can take hours depending on your disks, and it's using a LOT of CPU and hard disk bandwidth so during that time your system will be way slow. Use Activity Monitor to check which process is using the most CPU, so you can find stray programs.

For all the hype I don't think 10.7 a must have though - I like the new Mail.app - it finally got threaded views (like Gmail). But I never use the new mission control and have removed "launchpad" - launchpad on my system consists of 5 entire 1920x1200 screens full of icons - does that make launching apps fast? Certainly not.

And they made the Finder's side bar icons grey which is just stupid and much worse than before. Had to hack it to get some color back. The whole side bar is a major step backwards in usability.

There are other small improvements here or there but really nothing major. No issues with performance or memory though.

PS: Just remembered another *fantastic* feature in Lion: Preview now has a "sign" feature with which you can sign PDFs. It's cleverly using the built in camera to take a picture of your real signature, and inserts it into PDF documents. Very well done, seamless, and painless. I use this all the time. So this and the new Mail are the reasons to upgrade.

Maybe it was indexing. I had downloaded Adobe CS 5.5 and it was really slow after doing that. It seems better now. But I don't like that my hard drives don't mount to the desk top anymore and you have to go to Finder. Reminds me of Windows... I didn't like the new mail app at first either and I started to use Outlook. But I guess it's okay, it looks like the mail app on my iPad... I haven't needed to look at any pdf files since I installed 10.7, but that sounds kind of handy. Better than printing, signing the document and then scanning it... But no version of Pro Tools is out for 10.7 yet. I guess I'll play with it a while and decide. The one thing that pisses me off is I will have to reload all my music and apps into iTunes for both my iPad and iPod touch. My time machine HD failed a few weeks before my system crash, so I had to start from scratch. Seagate is sending me a free new external firewire drive this week, so after it arrives I'll decide what I want to do.

Lion will still show your hard drive (as well as external drives) on your desktop. Just go to Finder preferences ==> General and then under "Show these items on the desktop", tick Hard Drive or whatever you wish.

[Jimi007]

Works fine for me.

One thing about installing 10.7 is that the moment you start it up, it starts indexing your hard disks. This process can take hours depending on your disks, and it's using a LOT of CPU and hard disk bandwidth so during that time your system will be way slow. Use Activity Monitor to check which process is using the most CPU, so you can find stray programs.

For all the hype I don't think 10.7 a must have though - I like the new Mail.app - it finally got threaded views (like Gmail). But I never use the new mission control and have removed "launchpad" - launchpad on my system consists of 5 entire 1920x1200 screens full of icons - does that make launching apps fast? Certainly not.

And they made the Finder's side bar icons grey which is just stupid and much worse than before. Had to hack it to get some color back. The whole side bar is a major step backwards in usability.

There are other small improvements here or there but really nothing major. No issues with performance or memory though.

PS: Just remembered another *fantastic* feature in Lion: Preview now has a "sign" feature with which you can sign PDFs. It's cleverly using the built in camera to take a picture of your real signature, and inserts it into PDF documents. Very well done, seamless, and painless. I use this all the time. So this and the new Mail are the reasons to upgrade.

Maybe it was indexing. I had downloaded Adobe CS 5.5 and it was really slow after doing that. It seems better now. But I don't like that my hard drives don't mount to the desk top anymore and you have to go to Finder. Reminds me of Windows... I didn't like the new mail app at first either and I started to use Outlook. But I guess it's okay, it looks like the mail app on my iPad... I haven't needed to look at any pdf files since I installed 10.7, but that sounds kind of handy. Better than printing, signing the document and then scanning it... But no version of Pro Tools is out for 10.7 yet. I guess I'll play with it a while and decide. The one thing that pisses me off is I will have to reload all my music and apps into iTunes for both my iPad and iPod touch. My time machine HD failed a few weeks before my system crash, so I had to start from scratch. Seagate is sending me a free new external firewire drive this week, so after it arrives I'll decide what I want to do.

Lion will still show your hard drive (as well as external drives) on your desktop. Just go to Finder preferences ==> General and then under "Show these items on the desktop", tick Hard Drive or whatever you wish.

Thanks! Good tip. Wouldn't have thought to look there... But then again, I've only been using it for about 5 days. Do you have anymore secrets of 10.7? I like a few things about it better than 10.6, but it seems to hang at times which annoys me. I'll have to see after I reinstall Adobe CS again, if I can stand it. Or I might have to order 8 GB of RAM. Every time I look at the activity monitor it says I still have about 1 GB unused. But it still hangs up at times. CPU usage is usually pretty low.

[nikster]

Thanks! Good tip. Wouldn't have thought to look there... But then again, I've only been using it for about 5 days. Do you have anymore secrets of 10.7? I like a few things about it better than 10.6, but it seems to hang at times which annoys me. I'll have to see after I reinstall Adobe CS again, if I can stand it. Or I might have to order 8 GB of RAM. Every time I look at the activity monitor it says I still have about 1 GB unused. But it still hangs up at times. CPU usage is usually pretty low.

You could get iPulse which shows page file size and paging activity - that way you'd know whether the hiccups come from memory constraints. If you have big page files, then that's probably what it is. I have no issues with hanging over here. Adobe CS might be a problem, I've heard it doesn't work very well on Lion and Adobe always takes forever to update their programs for new OS releases...

OS X prides itself of using all memory available so the "memory free" metric isn't a good one to determine what's going on. If you have 16GB, OS X will try to use all 16GB to speed up the system. Using it has a hard disk cache for example. It's always optimizing to use as much memory as possible - sounds counter-intuitive but actually makes sense. Unused memory is a waste.

[bubba]

Works fine for me.

One thing about installing 10.7 is that the moment you start it up, it starts indexing your hard disks. This process can take hours depending on your disks, and it's using a LOT of CPU and hard disk bandwidth so during that time your system will be way slow. Use Activity Monitor to check which process is using the most CPU, so you can find stray programs.

For all the hype I don't think 10.7 a must have though - I like the new Mail.app - it finally got threaded views (like Gmail). But I never use the new mission control and have removed "launchpad" - launchpad on my system consists of 5 entire 1920x1200 screens full of icons - does that make launching apps fast? Certainly not.

And they made the Finder's side bar icons grey which is just stupid and much worse than before. Had to hack it to get some color back. The whole side bar is a major step backwards in usability.

There are other small improvements here or there but really nothing major. No issues with performance or memory though.

PS: Just remembered another *fantastic* feature in Lion: Preview now has a "sign" feature with which you can sign PDFs. It's cleverly using the built in camera to take a picture of your real signature, and inserts it into PDF documents. Very well done, seamless, and painless. I use this all the time. So this and the new Mail are the reasons to upgrade.

Maybe it was indexing. I had downloaded Adobe CS 5.5 and it was really slow after doing that. It seems better now. But I don't like that my hard drives don't mount to the desk top anymore and you have to go to Finder. Reminds me of Windows... I didn't like the new mail app at first either and I started to use Outlook. But I guess it's okay, it looks like the mail app on my iPad... I haven't needed to look at any pdf files since I installed 10.7, but that sounds kind of handy. Better than printing, signing the document and then scanning it... But no version of Pro Tools is out for 10.7 yet. I guess I'll play with it a while and decide. The one thing that pisses me off is I will have to reload all my music and apps into iTunes for both my iPad and iPod touch. My time machine HD failed a few weeks before my system crash, so I had to start from scratch. Seagate is sending me a free new external firewire drive this week, so after it arrives I'll decide what I want to do.

Lion will still show your hard drive (as well as external drives) on your desktop. Just go to Finder preferences ==> General and then under "Show these items on the desktop", tick Hard Drive or whatever you wish.

Thanks! Good tip. Wouldn't have thought to look there... But then again, I've only been using it for about 5 days. Do you have anymore secrets of 10.7? I like a few things about it better than 10.6, but it seems to hang at times which annoys me. I'll have to see after I reinstall Adobe CS again, if I can stand it. Or I might have to order 8 GB of RAM. Every time I look at the activity monitor it says I still have about 1 GB unused. But it still hangs up at times. CPU usage is usually pretty low.

According to Apple, Lion has over 250 new features. You can read about them here:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html

Actually, the option for showing or not showing your HD using Finder Prefs was always there. Showing the HD on your desktop used to be the default. For whatever reason, Apple decided to not show it by default in Lion.

As for Mail, if you like the old ("classic") view of 10.6, you can change back to that by going to Mail=>Preferences=>Viewing and then tick 'Use Classic Layout". Either way, I much prefer Mail to the clunky Outlook for OSX.

Not sure about your hangs. I've very rarely had a hang in Lion. Not sure what machine you are using or how much RAM you have, but the Lion system does use a bit more memory than 10.6. I think you need at least 4 GB of RAM, but you probably don't need 8. Where and how is it hanging for you?

[Jimi007]

Lion will still show your hard drive (as well as external drives) on your desktop. Just go to Finder preferences ==> General and then under "Show these items on the desktop", tick Hard Drive or whatever you wish.

Thanks! Good tip. Wouldn't have thought to look there... But then again, I've only been using it for about 5 days. Do you have anymore secrets of 10.7? I like a few things about it better than 10.6, but it seems to hang at times which annoys me. I'll have to see after I reinstall Adobe CS again, if I can stand it. Or I might have to order 8 GB of RAM. Every time I look at the activity monitor it says I still have about 1 GB unused. But it still hangs up at times. CPU usage is usually pretty low.

According to Apple, Lion has over 250 new features. You can read about them here:

http://www.apple.com...w/features.html

Actually, the option for showing or not showing your HD using Finder Prefs was always there. Showing the HD on your desktop used to be the default. For whatever reason, Apple decided to not show it by default in Lion.

As for Mail, if you like the old ("classic") view of 10.6, you can change back to that by going to Mail=>Preferences=>Viewing and then tick 'Use Classic Layout". Either way, I much prefer Mail to the clunky Outlook for OSX.

Not sure about your hangs. I've very rarely had a hang in Lion. Not sure what machine you are using or how much RAM you have, but the Lion system does use a bit more memory than 10.6. I think you need at least 4 GB of RAM, but you probably don't need 8. Where and how is it hanging for you?

It hangs in mail and Safari it seems mostly, while trying to load a document. I have an intel 2.53 Ghz core 2 duo with 4 GB RAM. I get the pinwheel more than I think I should or ever did with 10.6. Plus as Nikster and my friend that owns Apple repair shops said that Adobe CS 5 doesn't run properly on 10.7.2. I know Pro Tools doesn't even have a 10.7 version. But for right now, I'm just happy I got it running after my system crash without losing much other than some emails that I didn't really need. I get a bit impatient when my computers crash, but I always get them working again! I am just going to chill and check out 10.7.2 for a little while, but I need some programs in CS 5 plus to work properly. When I first installed it on 10.7.2 it was just crawling! I'm not sure I want to reinstall and have the same thing happen, when it worked just fine in 10.6...

[Jimi007]

Well, after using it for a while, it has crashed more than once. Since it indexes the HDs all the time seems to be a problem for me. I have a 500 GB internal and two firewire 800 drives connected all the time. A 500 GB for time machine and a 2 TB for data. Plus external USB drives of 1.5 TB, 2 TB and 3 TB. I'm most likely going to reinstall 10.6. I think I just do too much stuff and have too many apps for 10.7.2. Maybe I need an i7 processor with 8 GB RAM to use 10.7.2 and do what I was able to do on here with 10.6...

Edited December 24, 2011 by Jimi007

[triffid]

I have an 3 year old MacBook (running OSX10.6.8) with an intel 2.4 Ghz core 2 duo and just 2 GB RAM. Should I infer from the discussion then that I not try to load Lion? Don't want to take on any headaches - which I am certainly not equipped to remedy.

[bubba]

I have a three year old MacBook Air with 2 GB or RAM and Lion runs fine with it, although if I begin to do work with a lot of open applications, the anemic 2GB of RAM begins to require a lot of virtual memory and things slow down. That was the case with 10.6 though.

I'm not sure why Jimi007 is having so many problems with crashes. I am running Lion on three different Macs and it's very stable for me. It could be that you have some system extensions installed that do not play well with 10.7. It is true that Spotlight indexing can take a long time with the initial startup in 10.7, as the Spotlight cache is rebuilt, but that should be sorted within a couple of hours or overnight at the most for most users. once the cache is rebuilt, Spotlight does not index all the time, but it only updates the cache when files are added or edited. If I am counting correctly, Jimi has six HDs connected for a total of 9.5 TB of disk drive connected, so who knows how long Spotlight indexing would take for all that. I suspect that could have something to do with the hangs you are experiencing as well.

[Jimi007]

I have a three year old MacBook Air with 2 GB or RAM and Lion runs fine with it, although if I begin to do work with a lot of open applications, the anemic 2GB of RAM begins to require a lot of virtual memory and things slow down. That was the case with 10.6 though.

I'm not sure why Jimi007 is having so many problems with crashes. I am running Lion on three different Macs and it's very stable for me. It could be that you have some system extensions installed that do not play well with 10.7. It is true that Spotlight indexing can take a long time with the initial startup in 10.7, as the Spotlight cache is rebuilt, but that should be sorted within a couple of hours or overnight at the most for most users. once the cache is rebuilt, Spotlight does not index all the time, but it only updates the cache when files are added or edited. If I am counting correctly, Jimi has six HDs connected for a total of 9.5 TB of disk drive connected, so who knows how long Spotlight indexing would take for all that. I suspect that could have something to do with the hangs you are experiencing as well.

Well actually I normally just have an internal 500 GB and two FireWire 800 drives connected. A 500 GB which I now run Carbon Clone on because I discovered Time Machine is not backwards compatible and a 2 TB for data. When it gets full I dump stuff to USB drives, which are 1.5 TB, 2 TB and 3 TB. I just reinstalled 10.6.8 and no hangs now, everything runs fine, but I had to start from scratch. Time machine in 10.7.2 won't work to migrate with 10.6.8. Adobe software doesn't like 10.7.2 nor is there a version of Handbrake, or ProTools. So for me it's pretty useless! I guess I'm not a normal user...

[Jimi007]

Oh and by the way, the biggest pain is rebuilding iTunes. I have over 300 apps for iPod Touch/iPhone and iPad, plus 6,000 songs just on my iPod touch. Senuti came in handy for my music or I'd be looking though archived files for days!

Edited December 31, 2011 by Jimi007

[Jimi007]

I have an 3 year old MacBook (running OSX10.6.8) with an intel 2.4 Ghz core 2 duo and just 2 GB RAM. Should I infer from the discussion then that I not try to load Lion? Don't want to take on any headaches - which I am certainly not equipped to remedy.

As my friend who owns several Apple repair shops in California told me before I loaded 10.7.2 on my MacBook Pro, DON'T DO IT! But I didn't have a bootable copy of 10.6.8 here, and I did have one of 10.7 I tried it for two weeks. I do like some features about it, but it seems they still have some work to do on it and so do some other software companies to make their products compatible... Good thing I've rebuilt systems on hard drives for many years. But it's still a major pain to do.

[bubba]

I'm currently beta testing OSX 10.7.3 and it looks to me like some improvements have been made with memory usage and stability. There hasn't been a new build in a while, so my bet is that it will be released soon. Mail and Safari have been focus areas, including with the last build, and there are new builds of those applications included. Maybe 10.7.3 might fix some of the issues people have been having with Lion.

[Jimi007]

I'm currently beta testing OSX 10.7.3 and it looks to me like some improvements have been made with memory usage and stability. There hasn't been a new build in a while, so my bet is that it will be released soon. Mail and Safari have been focus areas, including with the last build, and there are new builds of those applications included. Maybe 10.7.3 might fix some of the issues people have been having with Lion.

Hopefully, but I still use programs that aren't made yet for 10.7, but I seem to think there may be a good reason that they aren't. Maybe when 10.7.5 comes out it will be ready... Oh by the way I did install iWork and I used Pages last night. I like it better than Word. I use to use Appleworks for many years, but I always had Office for compatibility with Windows users and our billing is written in Excel.

[bubba]

Have a look at this site, which shows 10.7 compatibility for hundreds of apps. According to this, ProTools 9.0.5 works with Lion.

As for Adobe CS5, Dreamweaver gets a free rating, others get a caution and there is a new version of Photoshop in Beta that will have a green rating.

[Jimi007]

Have a look at this site, which shows 10.7 compatibility for hundreds of apps. According to this, ProTools 9.0.5 works with Lion.

As for Adobe CS5, Dreamweaver gets a free rating, others get a caution and there is a new version of Photoshop in Beta that will have a green rating.

You didn't include a link to the site you were talking about. But I'm not going back to 10.7.2. I don't want to be a Beta tester, I want things to work! I got everything working just fine on 10.6.8...

Thanks for your input though.