imac i7 slow

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pmac

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hey just checking if anyone has has issues with there new imacs being slow.
just recently bought a i7 3.4 27inch and have only used it a few times in the past week.since buying it, but today decided to send it back as im not happy with the speed and running of the machine.
for example my 2 year old £400 laptop runs lightroom faster than my mac runs the apeture trial...
the hole computer has ground to a halt twice now.out of the four times its been used .even when talking to apple care today it took about 30sec if not more for the drop down bar to show when clicking the apple sign on the top bar. they were not much use either to be honest told me to do a few things then use it for a day or two and if it was still happening contact them again and go through some more things. but have until the first or cant teturn it as its outwith there 14 days so will get a refund and deside if i want to get another.also would have had a worrie about it even.if it seemwd to work okay.
lovely machine but not to impressed with what i payed and what i got...sry bit of a rant

anyone else suffered similar
 
Obivously somthing wrong with the machine, Have you checked your permissions, and restored from the back up media?
 
I'd install istats menu which will show you what is using cpu and such like. It could be a rogue process that is hogging or something like it is over heating so the cpu power is lowered to lower the temperature. Make sure none of the vents are blocked.

Is it everything that is slow or just the aperture trial?
 
hahaha dont have a clue about anything you guys are talking about.. one reason i bought a mac there ment to be less hassle.

the mac shouldnt be to hot as its on a large open desk.

the hole mac slows right down and even opening things on the task bar take ages.
the problem is there is no consistancy to when it does this the other day it ran fine when i downloaded and tryed apeture. the day before that it went very sluggish. but today it was a joke.
i expected this being there top imac to run what ever i threw at it without batting an eyelid.

i downloaded and ran a benchmark test and it was just under what vids on you tube were getting.but i was using the free 32bit version and not the 64bit which should supposidly give the proper results(just higher rhan mine think it was just over 11000)

just for a piece of mind its going back now anyway
 
Very surprising, my i7 laptop blazes through everything I throw at it without fuss, delay or any sort of hang :shrug:

You did the right thing taking it back before it passes the 14th day
 
I would suggest a call to Applecare (which is free in the first 3 months). They will go through the issue and no doubt come up with a reason. An i7 iMac shouldn't feel slow with lightroom 3 at all.

How many images in your library? How much RAM?

I have 12K images in mine and running on a 2.5GHz penryn core2duo 6Gb MBP it flys along quite happily.
 
The machine must have a fault, I have an older 24" imac and it's still speedy with over 10k images in lightroom and it's got well over 100gb of stuff on the hdd.

the i7 should fly !
 
pmac said:
its with apeture and i only loaded maby 200 into the program .
but did put 100gigs worth onto the hd.

just waiting on them confirming pick up now.
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To be honest you'd be better taking it to an apple expert at the shop who can talk you through sorting it whilst you watch and learn but if it is sorted this way then great.

Is it the 4Gb model?

Even when I had 4Gb on the MBP it would run CS4 & LR3. I was never a real fan of Aperture to be honest preferring LR with CS4/5
 
its getting returned for a refund not repair. ive lost all trust in it now.

yeah its the 4gb version.

was just having a try with apeture using the free trial hadnt sorted lightroom for it yet and think i do prefer lightroom aswell
 
pmac said:
its getting returned for a refund not repair. ive lost all trust in it now.

yeah its the 4gb version.

was just having a try with apeture using the free trial hadnt sorted lightroom for it yet and think i do prefer lightroom aswell
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Seriously, go and try another one at the Apple store. Take along an external drive with a few hundred RAW images on it and import them then play using LR3. The Apple store should be able to have an iMac for you to try with CS5 and LR3 on it. This is my preferred setup and having tried this on all 3 of my machines (i5 11" 4Gb MBA, penryn 2.5GHz 6Gb MBP & 3GHz Quad Xeon 10Gb Mac Pro) there is VERY little difference between them..... LR3 is not a very taxing program which basically proves that there must have been an issue with the i7 iMac's setup.
 
I think Dell are doing the XPS with i5 quad cores for about £700 or so at the moment. 3 year warranty is stupid money at nearly £300 though.

Just ordered the basic imac with 4gb and i5. Got to be faster than a core duo and a g5.
 
The 27" iMac is an absolute steal at £1300 (and MUCH cheaper with student discount/VAT repay etc). When you consider the price of that 27" IPS panel - Try searching for another monitor with that spec and they are £600-700. So the rest of the iMac is about £600........

It looks like Apple is becoming better value. It is just a shame that their Mac Pro line is an absolute rip off. When I bought mine it cost £2000 (minus student discount) so £1550. At that time is was maybe 20% more expensive than a similar spec PC and actually cheaper than buying the individual components!! i.e. (1Kw PSU, 2 x Dual Xeon, 4Gb Ram (expandable.....), workstation class motherboard, decent metal case etc etc. (in fact I know of a company that bought 20 of them and wiped them installing Windows 2000 on them for an engineering department - I bought a couple of their keyboards :D)

I think that Apple will discontinue it soon unless they are looking at a complete re-vamp......
 
cowasaki said:
The 27" iMac is an absolute steal at £1300
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Well... it's £1400 actually ;) Unfortunately, you can't upgrade the processor in that one :(

It's also not clear how OSX handles the low power states of the core. On Windows, it's difficult (if not impossible) to get the max multiplier as the other cores on chip have to be in S6 (I think) state before they can be considered idle and so allow the other cores to turbo higher. The way the OS manages the cores mean that for most practical cases, this state is never achieved for windows. That particular i5 has a strange set of 100MHz adders in (1/5/9/10 i.e. 4 cores turbo'd = 2.8GHz/3 cores turbo'd=3.2GHz/2 cores turbo'd=3.6GHz/1 core turbo'd=3.7GHz) The upshot is that that Mac might only be able to turbo reliably to 2.8GHz.

Compare that to an unlocked i7 which has 2x the cores and can have all of them turbo'd (via overclock) to 4.4GHz reliably (or even a locked i7 which can get to 3.5GHz on all 4 cores/3.6GHz on 3/3.7GHz on 2/3.8GHz on 1 core) and it doesn't look quite as good a bargain IMHO.

I'll readily admit that you need to be a geek to understand all this and know what it means for performance, but sometimes it helps to be a geek to get past the marketing ;)
 
cowasaki said:
It looks like Apple is becoming better value. It is just a shame that their Mac Pro line is an absolute rip off. When I bought mine it cost £2000 (minus student discount) so £1550. At that time is was maybe 20% more expensive than a similar spec PC and actually cheaper than buying the individual components!! i.e. (1Kw PSU, 2 x Dual Xeon, 4Gb Ram (expandable.....), workstation class motherboard, decent metal case etc etc. (in fact I know of a company that bought 20 of them and wiped them installing Windows 2000 on them for an engineering department - I bought a couple of their keyboards :D)

I think that Apple will discontinue it soon unless they are looking at a complete re-vamp......
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I was messing about on the Apple store the other day while pondering an upgrade to 27, I managed to spec a mac pro that didn't have all the bells and whistles..... but still came to a shade under 9K without a screen !!!
 
arad85 said:
Well... it's £1400 actually ;) Unfortunately, you can't upgrade the processor in that one :(

It's also not clear how OSX handles the low power states of the core. On Windows, it's difficult (if not impossible) to get the max multiplier as the other cores on chip have to be in S6 (I think) state before they can be considered idle and so allow the other cores to turbo higher. The way the OS manages the cores mean that for most practical cases, this state is never achieved for windows. That particular i5 has a strange set of 100MHz adders in (1/5/9/10 i.e. 4 cores turbo'd = 2.8GHz/3 cores turbo'd=3.2GHz/2 cores turbo'd=3.6GHz/1 core turbo'd=3.7GHz) The upshot is that that Mac might only be able to turbo reliably to 2.8GHz.

Compare that to an unlocked i7 which has 2x the cores and can have all of them turbo'd (via overclock) to 4.4GHz reliably (or even a locked i7 which can get to 3.5GHz on all 4 cores/3.6GHz on 3/3.7GHz on 2/3.8GHz on 1 core) and it doesn't look quite as good a bargain IMHO.

I'll readily admit that you need to be a geek to understand all this and know what it means for performance, but sometimes it helps to be a geek to get past the marketing ;)
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Ok £1399, the quoted prices are just a starting point though :)

The fact is that for the difference in price between a £600-700 monitor and the £1400 the difference is perfectly reasonable for a QUALITY machine. The difference is getting less. Yes the best value is still with Windows but Apple machines are getting cheaper in relative terms and certainly over say a 3 year ownership period. £1400+ say one OS upgrade at £29 and still being able to sell it for maybe £600 gives total cost of ownership at about £750 if you did the same with Windows you might find that the cost is similar. £650 for a Dell U2711 + £400-500 for equiv PC + £100 OS upgrade = £1200 then £200 back from Windows machine and maybe £300 for the monitor gives total cost at about £700 (again all prices are approximate). I'm not starting a Windows v Mac thing but just saying that they seem to be getting the pricing going in the right direction. Clearly with Windows machines you could just upgrade the box and in fact you could just upgrade BITS of the box but that is not something that most people do! I have known people throw away a 14 month old computer because it had a virus!! Not everyone is happy to build a machine from scratch like we are. Also Apple will heavily discount their machines if you know a student making the value even better :)
 
digitalfailure said:
I was messing about on the Apple store the other day while pondering an upgrade to 27, I managed to spec a mac pro that didn't have all the bells and whistles..... but still came to a shade under 9K without a screen !!!
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Oh I know but the reality is that these are just options and upgrading the memory, drives etc yourself is VASTLY cheaper :)

Still I wouldn't buy a Mac Pro anymore the cost is just ridiculous. If I needed that much processing power I would build a serious liquid cooled PC and break Apple's EULA.
 
Brian,

As an example to what I was talking about in post #19 what was the original purchase price of your 24" iMac and how much is it worth now?

Had you gone down the PC route then you would have paid less to start and got less back now (if anything).

The total cost of ownership is similar.

It's like owning certain cars over other cars.
 
Not that it matters now, you were to impatient and took it back. But you mention you chucked 100Gb of data on, well OSX needs to index that for spotlight search.

My iMac had the exact same issue for a few days after I purchased it. You need to leave the machine on, and for a good few hours to let it index your Hardrive. It's a one time thing, but it eats up a whole lot of CPU while it's doing it. If you interrupt it or shut down, it starts from scratch again the next time you login.

You can see if it is indexing by pressing cmd-space to bring up spotlight. It'll either tell you it's indexing or not.
 
digitalfailure said:
I was messing about on the Apple store the other day while pondering an upgrade to 27, I managed to spec a mac pro that didn't have all the bells and whistles..... but still came to a shade under 9K without a screen !!!
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I just did quick spec/price check on the apple site and they don't seem expensive at all. I stuck in similar hardware to our new HP (work) workstations and it actually came out cheaper, you're still looking at close to 5 figures though...

For a desktop yeah, expensive, but for high end workstations (with tens of GB of ram and twin hex core processors) they seem (at first glance) to be around the same price as the competition.
 
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iamchrisphoto said:
Not that it matters now, you were to impatient and took it back. But you mention you chucked 100Gb of data on, well OSX needs to index that for spotlight search.

My iMac had the exact same issue for a few days after I purchased it. You need to leave the machine on, and for a good few hours to let it index your Hardrive. It's a one time thing, but it eats up a whole lot of CPU while it's doing it. If you interrupt it or shut down, it starts from scratch again the next time you login.

You can see if it is indexing by pressing cmd-space to bring up spotlight. It'll either tell you it's indexing or not.
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It is a good point, spotlight indexing which only happens once (unless you force it) and facial recognition kicking in on the RAW photos. Then it is all the RAW processing to generate the preview files as well.

It can take a day or two to settle down, have the caches properly rebuild etc. Can take longer if one is in a PC habit of switching the machine off.

I must admit the OP gave up/in rather quickly.
 
PC habit of switching the machine off? I'm intrigued... :thinking:

Don't macs run on electricity now?
 
well i may have given up quickly but it had to be returned within 14 day and i wasnt spending nearly £1600 on a comp that may or may not have had a problem. i expected it to work.

applecare never sugested what you's are saying and they were told exactly what ive said here..they were not much help to be honest. they just got me to check the hd was okay and told me to keep using it for a few days more with two seperate accounts and then to contact them again.

if it is what you's say that wouldnt explain why it worked perfectly fine 3 out of the 5 times it was used 2 of which were after the large data install.
 
Amp34 said:
PC habit of switching the machine off? I'm intrigued... :thinking:

Don't macs run on electricity now?
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Sleep works properly, and no memory leaks. Only needs a reboot for a core OS upgrade.

pmac said:
well i may have given up quickly but it had to be returned within 14 day and i wasnt spending nearly £1600 on a comp that may or may not have had a problem. i expected it to work.

applecare never sugested what you's are saying and they were told exactly what ive said here..they were not much help to be honest. they just got me to check the hd was okay and told me to keep using it for a few days more with two seperate accounts and then to contact them again.

if it is what you's say that wouldnt explain why it worked perfectly fine 3 out of the 5 times it was used 2 of which were after the large data install.
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My comment on giving up quick was more relating to not getting another one. I'd return it as well within the 14 days. Sometimes electronics are just faulty, it does happen also to Apple.
 
Cool, it is a shame your first experience was thwarted. I hope for you they don't mess up next time :)
 
We had slow Mac i7 probs. If you switch the mains off after use you MUST use this sequence to restart:
Switch on mouse.
Switch on Mac (and wait till it boots)
Switch on keyboard.

There is a problem with the Bluetooth keyboard and Lion apparently that causes the Mac to boot into safe mode but only if you switch everything off.
 
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DonnaM said:
We had slow Mac i7 probs. If you switch the mains off after use you MUST use this sequence to restart:
Switch on mouse.
Switch on Mac (and wait till it boots)
Switch on keyboard.

There is a problem with the Bluetooth keyboard and Lion apparently that causes the Mac to boot into safe mode but only if you switch everything off.
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We have several machines running Lion and they work just as they should. No idea why yours would behave like that. Have you spoken to Apple?
 
cowasaki said:
We have several machines running Lion and they work just as they should. No idea why yours would behave like that. Have you spoken to Apple?
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+1 got 5 in our house and not seen that before. But as stated before I don't shutdown let alone switch the power off at the socket.
 
Sorry but why were the posts replying to dejongj deleted? He made a silly comment and was corrected. Especially odd as the original comment, my question and his reply are still there. Or am I just going mad?

STAFF EDIT: A number of spoiling posts were removed.
 
RE: slow iMac a couple of good points have been made

Spotlight indexing is CPU heavy first time just give it a day or so (you can turn indexing off for specific folders (all your photos) or external) drives.

DON'T use iPhoto if you have lots of photos of many different people as the face recognition is VERY slow.

I have a 2009 i7 and no speed issues with Aperture 3 and a 12000 image library but do have 12GB ram
 
cowasaki said:
We have several machines running Lion and they work just as they should. No idea why yours would behave like that. Have you spoken to Apple?
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Yes we have Darren. We bought our first two iMacs in October, both had the same problem. After 4 calls to Apple support and 1 Lion re-installation, WE found the problem. When we told Apple, they said that they knew about it and were considering a fix to Lion. Apparently it is a problem with the latest bluetooth keyboards, mid 2011 iMacs and Lion. The problem only occurs if you switch everything off: mains from the Mac and keyboard. I think if the keyboard is switched on first and there is no powered up Mac, when the Mac boots, it interprets the keyboard "where are you" message as a spacebar and promptly enters safe mode which is S L O W.
 
well the saga continues....

after being offered an exchange and deciding to get a refund .i decided to contact them and get the exchange so they cancelled the pic up today and told me to phone back today to make sure they have the same modle instock as its a refurb.

for me to be told today that they dont do exchanges on refurbs and my refund will have re be reset up.
so have to range another pick up date and wait longer to re buy one online.

they never said anything today and as i contacted them a few days ago with in the 14day return time i hope to have no problems but as off tmr the 14 days finnishes. if they make a fuss about it i wont be happy at all
 
hahaha... just recieved an email from an apple sale advisor saying that under certain curcumstances they can do a replacement and have found a model to replace mine but have to get approvel to do so(what the guy i spoke to who said they would replace it said days ago) all this after being told twice that its.not possible.

so again my pick up has been stoped and i have to wait another 24 to see if it approved. if not have to go through the pick up process again
 
pmac said:
hahaha... just recieved an email from an apple sale advisor saying that under certain curcumstances they can do a replacement and have found a model to replace mine but have to get approvel to do so(what the guy i spoke to who said they would replace it said days ago) all this after being told twice that its.not possible.

so again my pick up has been stoped and i have to wait another 24 to see if it approved. if not have to go through the pick up process again
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Apple customer service is legendary! Email customer services and tell them that this is your first computer and they are not really living up to expectations. You might be surprised at how nice they get.

I emailed them during my purchasing of a MBA at the end of last month to tell them about an issue I had had with a faulty power supply on a computer that is just over 3 years old and that the battery expanded..... They sent me a new power supply and half the cost of a battery !!!
 
i think i may do that. thats me had the courier phone today to collect the imac from the origional collection even though that was cancelled 3 days ago.
supposidly they came yesterday also... no one at apple seems to know what they are doing ,can do or are allowed to do.

thats now 4 people dealing with my case at the same time.....
 
pmac said:
i think i may do that. thats me had the courier phone today to collect the imac from the origional collection even though that was cancelled 3 days ago.
supposidly they came yesterday also... no one at apple seems to know what they are doing ,can do or are allowed to do.

thats now 4 people dealing with my case at the same time.....
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Get the email in. You might find them replacing your machine with a factory fresh one.
 
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