[eightbit]

hi there. really enjoying my new macbook, but seem to be running into a problem. specifically, the macbook seems to slow down considerably after 15 minutes or so. for instance, when scrolling in firefox, the screen can't refresh fast enough to keep up with the page, resulting in really jumpy page scrolling. pressing F12 for dashboard leaves me with maybe 3 or 4 frames of the animation, as opposed to the nice smooth movement I'm used to. same thing with expose.

having just installed new Ram (2 gigs of transcend) this morning, I'm inclined to think it might be that. looking at the system info, the RAM is showing up there, so I know that both of the sticks are being noticed by the system. is there such a thing as ram that just doesn't work right? i always thought that with RAM, it either worked or it didn't.

btw, I just double checked the RAM specs and the RAM I installed matches the appropriate specs, so there's no issue there.

any ideas? shall I return the RAM?

some other info:
currently running firefox (monitor says 12% CPU usage), and system monitor only...well Dashboard with one widget and finder of course.

[smnsez]

Im New to mac got mine last saturday.. havent notice any slowdown..

[eightbit]

well, i've decided to return the RAM I purchased, although I'm starting to wonder if maybe the problem is firefox. i reinstalled the apple RAM, totally removed firefox, and everything seems to be going smoothly.

has anyone had a similar problem with firefox. i remember hearing about memory leaks and something about mouse clicks & cpu jumps. looks like i'll be using safari for a bit (gonna miss my del.icio.us and developer plugins).

[deslock]

How much free memory does Activity Monitor say you have when you have Firefox running?

For purposes of comparison, I'm down to a few hundred MB free memory with 14 GB of virtual memory (of which Firefox is using 300+ MB RAM and 1.1 GB virtual memory). This is on a 2 GHz MacBook w 2GB G.Skill RAM running Gimp, iPhoto, iTunes, Open Office, MS Excel, Mail, iChat, Stickies, Firefox (w/20 tabs), and QT (playing a 1 GB h.264 MP4 movie).

Everything is smooth... I've experienced no Dashboard, Expose, or scrolling slow downs.

Also, FYI memtest is useful for testing new memory.

[eightbit]

To the best of my recollection, it was around 1.5 GB of free memory, running just firefox with 2 or 3 tabs open.

I did download memtest, but the test was taking too long and had to quit. Perhaps I'll reseat the new RAM and have a chance to the run the test tonight.

[muaddib420]

i'd just pop in the old 512 apple ram, retry firefox and see if you get any of the slowdown. if it's OK, then you know it's the new RAM. also, does this slowdown occur in safari?

another thing to watch out for is you really need to use a bit of force to properly seat the RAM. especially at first. once you take it in and out a few times, it'll get easier to seat/unseat.

[eightbit]

the slowdown, once it happened, affected the entire system and any app I chose to run.

in regards to seating the RAM, i always thought that if the system was seeing the RAM, then it had been properly inserted. is that not the case?

thanks, folks, for all your help!

[eightbit]

well, this has been quite a learning experience for a new mac user. at this point, I am heading towards placing the blame on the non-Universal Binary version of flash that was running in the browsers, both Safari and Firefox. After installing version 9 for intel macs, everything seems to be going smoothly.

did anyone else have massive system slowdown related to flash?

[deslock]

I haven't noticed any slowdowns due to Rosetta apps, though I don't think I've ever had a Rosetta browser or flash player installed.

From your posts, you changed the memory and FireFox, and the problem went away. If you can recreate the behavior with the stock RAM installed, you'll know it wasn't the new memory. Or you could reinstall the 2GB and see if the problem returns.