My DS friends: tips to tidy up MacBook Pro

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  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 7
    Forum Member
    Gilbertoo wrote: »
    Hey!

    I only use my MacBook Pro for music production, DJing and basic web surfing (nothing grotty!). It still runs really well but have noticed that iTunes and the Internet have been running slower than normal.

    Any tips to tidy things up?

    Upgrade the RAM :)

    I own a 2010 Macbook that had 2GB and was running slow especially when trying to run iTunes, Safari and do work in Word, Excel or Text Wrangler.

    If you check the memory application in the activity monitor and you see your hard desk being used as RAM that's a big bottleneck! Mine was putting crazy amounts of RAM memory onto the hard disk.

    Maxed it out to 8GB and it's now running mountain lion like a dream even with multiple programs and memory hog apps running at same time! You want to make it so your mac has no page outs to the hard disk. (That will make sense when you see the activity monitor screen)

    My mac never pages out now and it's so much the faster for it. Also frees up a chunk of ram for the graphics card so my mac runs COD Black Ops even though it's a couple of years old machine :)
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 25,366
    Forum Member
    ✭✭✭
    Upgrade the RAM :)

    I own a 2010 Macbook that had 2GB and was running slow especially when trying to run iTunes, Safari and do work in Word, Excel or Text Wrangler.

    If you check the memory application in the activity monitor and you see your hard desk being used as RAM that's a big bottleneck! Mine was putting crazy amounts of RAM memory onto the hard disk.

    Maxed it out to 8GB and it's now running mountain lion like a dream even with multiple programs and memory hog apps running at same time! You want to make it so your mac has no page outs to the hard disk. (That will make sense when you see the activity monitor screen)

    My mac never pages out now and it's so much the faster for it. Also frees up a chunk of ram for the graphics card so my mac runs COD Black Ops even though it's a couple of years old machine :)

    My Mac already has 8gb of RAM.....
  • TheBigMTheBigM Posts: 13,125
    Forum Member
    ✭✭
    Gilbertoo wrote: »
    Okay, a quick insight;

    Well, for DJing, music and video production, Macs seem much more stable and worthy of the extra money spent on them. Even today when the gap between Mac & PC seems to be shrinking.

    I bought a Sony Vaio i7 core laptop w/8gb memory for around £750 and this took an age to configure to work properly for a Traktor Pro set-up using a Traktor Kontrol S4.....but even then, anything more than 2-channels being used created a rather buggy, crash-happy set-up.

    I now have a MacBook Pro i7 core laptop w/8gb memory (£1,200) and the difference with running the same set-up is astounding, it really is! I can now confidently run 4-channels at once with zero fear of the damn thing crashing....and this was pretty much an "out the box" set-up! I've not needed to use any of the 8 sample banks yet, but it'd be interesting to see how stable it would be if I was to try running 4-channels, plus 8 sample banks (which, at the risk of sounding patronising, is basically saying 'can it handle upto 12 songs at once')!

    But to be fair, if a person won't be doing a lot of multimedia production, I think getting a Mac is probably overkill and would probably be more about style and the need to appear trendy/cool and IMO, a waste of money. We still have the Sony Vaio and with W7, MS Office, Project and Visio installed, it really is a great work laptop!

    Thanks for that post. It seems like Mac's Core Audio feature is helping you out a lot.
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