So my sister got a macbook...

L1ght

Gawd
Joined
Nov 11, 2005
Messages
865
My little sister got a free macbook to use for school, and she just brought it home today.

Lucky girl, or not?

This thing is super slow. Like it takes 2 minutes to load up firefox. :eek: Is the 512mb of ram causing this?

Everything is restricted in some way. Itunes doesnt run. I download handbrake, no go. Quicktime works. Divx player works(WFT?)

All I want is for her to be able to play movies and music at home off the network. So i need a music and movie player. Divx player works, but i need a AC3 codec. Where could i find one and how to install it?

As for music, it might be harder... Quicktime works for wma(flip4mac is installed, another wft.) mp3's ask for itunes, which is disabled. Any ideas here?

Thanks for the help. This is the first mac i have messed around with, and I am not liking it so far. :(
 
L1ght said:
My little sister got a free macbook to use for school, and she just brought it home today.

Lucky girl, or not?

This thing is super slow. Like it takes 2 minutes to load up firefox. :eek: Is the 512mb of ram causing this?

Everything is restricted in some way. Itunes doesnt run. I download handbrake, no go. Quicktime works. Divx player works(WFT?)

All I want is for her to be able to play movies and music at home off the network. So i need a music and movie player. Divx player works, but i need a AC3 codec. Where could i find one and how to install it?

As for music, it might be harder... Quicktime works for wma(flip4mac is installed, another wft.) mp3's ask for itunes, which is disabled. Any ideas here?

Thanks for the help. This is the first mac i have messed around with, and I am not liking it so far. :(
If she got a Tiger CD, why not reinstall?

The 512MB of ram would slow things down, but this seems odd to me.
 
sounds like a reinstall would take care of things. 512MB of RAM might slow things down a little, but FireFox shouldn't take 2 minutes to load.
 
Reinstall, make sure she's got an Administrator account, and bump up the RAM. It's a little sluggish on only 512.
 
The Latest firefox seems to take a while to load on both my comps, its quicker on the desktop which is slower odd
 
512mb was a little sluggish for me
threw a 1GB SODIMM in the machine this weekend and ive seen a dramatic increase in speed

However, the symptoms you mention are really messed up. Try restoring/reinstalling OSX.

Search google for quicktime codecs. That's what I had to do.
a couple of my downloaded movies still have audio but no video. but hey, thats why i installed bootcamp.
 
how fast is the cpu speed? my macbookpro runs fine with 512 mb of ram, though i had a free upgrade recently to 1gb
 
spencers said:
Search google for quicktime codecs. That's what I had to do.
a couple of my downloaded movies still have audio but no video. but hey, thats why i installed bootcamp.

You'vee be able to play everything if you grab VLC. The current stable release doesn't play WMV 3 video, but the nightlies do.
 
L1ght said:
My little sister got a free macbook to use for school, and she just brought it home today.

Lucky girl, or not?

This thing is super slow. Like it takes 2 minutes to load up firefox. :eek: Is the 512mb of ram causing this?

Everything is restricted in some way. Itunes doesnt run. I download handbrake, no go. Quicktime works. Divx player works(WFT?)

All I want is for her to be able to play movies and music at home off the network. So i need a music and movie player. Divx player works, but i need a AC3 codec. Where could i find one and how to install it?

As for music, it might be harder... Quicktime works for wma(flip4mac is installed, another wft.) mp3's ask for itunes, which is disabled. Any ideas here?

Thanks for the help. This is the first mac i have messed around with, and I am not liking it so far. :(

If she got it for free for school use they probabaly have a custom image installed that has these items disabled so I don't know how happy they will be to have that stuff re-enabled


 
not to sound like a dick, but if it's for school, why are you trying to load all that crap on it?
 
mrweasel said:
not to sound like a dick, but if it's for school, why are you trying to load all that crap on it?
That's like saying that if someone gave you a ferrari to drive around a race track, you would always keep it under 55. There's no punishment for going over, (or in this sense making the potential for education greater). So why not? If they specifically tell you not to, then of course don't, but a re-install sounds like a good idea. Or even better yet install XP and see what they say!
 
mrweasel said:
not to sound like a dick, but if it's for school, why are you trying to load all that crap on it?

Because a school computer quickly takes over the position as your "home computer" so you'd better just give in and fill it with stuff.
 
Whoa. Settle down guys.

After school today, it seems as if they disabled most of the restrictions. Itunes works, handbrake to. So Im happy. :)

It still runs slow. Anyone know of a ram monitoring tool for mac? I would like to see if that is the problem.
 
L1ght said:
It still runs slow. Anyone know of a ram monitoring tool for mac? I would like to see if that is the problem.
Open the terminal and type in top.
 
Any computer with less than 2GB of Ram today is worthless

Firefox is also worthless
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
Firefox is also worthless

Whoa there. That's quite an assertion. You must have quite an ace up your sleeve to be making such a claim.
 
CEpeep said:
Whoa there. That's quite an assertion. You must have quite an ace up your sleeve to be making such a claim.

Since I have a Mac, and dont get Viruses and Spyware, I use Safari.
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
Since I have a Mac, and dont get Viruses and Spyware, I use Safari.

Safari is the ace up your sleeve? It's not a bad browser, but I don't understand how it makes Firefox worthless. I still use Firefox because of all the great extensions. To the best of my knowledge, Safari still has no equivalent to Greasemonkey, a nearly essential tool for browsing the web nowadays. Also the fact that Uno keeps it from looking like a *nix application inside of Aqua is great.
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
Any computer with less than 2GB of Ram today is worthless
I agree that OS X runs much faster when you have more ram, but since they're so worthless, feel free to send any computers anyone has lying around with less than 2GB of ram to me. I'm sure I can find something to do with them.
 
B. W. said:
I agree that OS X runs much faster when you have more ram, but since they're so worthless, feel free to send any computers anyone has lying around with less than 2GB of ram to me. I'm sure I can find something to do with them.

None of my 3 computers have less than 2 GB of Ram, so I have nothing to send. I mean honestly, you know that Ram is probly the most important when dealing with OSX. But In 2002, I was on a Gig of ram and that was unheard of... I guess I am just ahead of the game.
 
L1ght said:
Whoa. Settle down guys.

After school today, it seems as if they disabled most of the restrictions. Itunes works, handbrake to. So Im happy. :)

It still runs slow. Anyone know of a ram monitoring tool for mac? I would like to see if that is the problem.


look up some of the widgets, i use istat nano.
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
Since I have a Mac, and dont get Viruses and Spyware, I use Safari.

I have a mac, don't get viruses and spyware, I use firefox. It's a better browser.
 
z3r0- said:
I have a mac, don't get viruses and spyware, I use firefox. It's a better browser.

firefox is old news.. there losing steam. Opera is a strong competitor and Safari on os x is better then firefox for os x.
 
Ok people what the hell is this crap?


You should all know the routine by now

:rolleyes:
 
:confused:

I just came for the french fries.

Seriously though, open Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor. You should be able to hit cmd-spacebar to bring up the Spotlight search thingie and type in "activity monitor" (just type until it finds it; you don't have to write the whole thing) and go from there as well. It shows you what processes are running, how much RAM they use, etc. Make sure it's set to show all processes. If you click on the various colums, you can change the sorting order. First set it to % CPU to see if anything's using the CPU. Then set it to Real Memory to see which apps are gobbling the most RAM.

If Firefox is running slow, why not give Safari a twirl? For the Mac, I think it's better than Firefox which always feels a little clunky...
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
Seriously though, open Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor.

Why open Terminal unless you have to...

/I know
//shuts the hell up
 
Okay, after looking at the activity monitor, i think i found the problem. At startup, I have 5 mb of ram free. :eek:

About 256mb of ram is being used by a process called sed. this process is also using 2.4 gigs of virtual ram. :eek:

This must be a program that is somehow related to the backup and other stuff the school runs. I am going to shoot the admin an email asking about this mysterious program.

I cant kill it, since my sisters account is not admin.

BTW, my sister is in 6th grade, my school offered computers to 6th and 7th graders. :cool:
 
L1ght said:
Okay, after looking at the activity monitor, i think i found the problem. At startup, I have 5 mb of ram free. :eek:

About 256mb of ram is being used by a process called sed. this process is also using 2.4 gigs of virtual ram. :eek:

This must be a program that is somehow related to the backup and other stuff the school runs. I am going to shoot the admin an email asking about this mysterious program.

I cant kill it, since my sisters account is not admin.

BTW, my sister is in 6th grade, my school offered computers to 6th and 7th graders. :cool:

sed is a shell utility for inline text replacement.
 
L1ght said:
So it is on every mac?

Yes, if a proper install (BSD Subsystem) was done. On the other hand, it shouldn't be running all the time.
 
CEpeep said:
Yes, if a proper install (BSD Subsystem) was done. On the other hand, it shouldn't be running all the time.
Interesting. Thanks for the help. :)
 
L1ght said:
Okay, after looking at the activity monitor, i think i found the problem. At startup, I have 5 mb of ram free. :eek:
On a Mac, you shouldn't really look at the amount of "free" RAM. Mac OS X will always try to minimize the amount of free RAM, since unused memory is wasted memory. Instead, look at the amount of inactive RAM.


Weird that sed's running. Does it use any CPU power, or just gobbles of memory?
 
sed is installed in most GNU/*NIX systems...but with it sucking that much memory I wonder what it's doing. I have a macbook with 1gb of ram but tested a 512mb model too, it was almost as snappy as mine.

I'd guess the school's admin has set up something to use the macbooks for distributed computing, I can't honestly think of anything else they'd need to run sed for on a 7th graders laptop.
 
ZupZupper said:
sed is installed in most GNU/*NIX systems...but with it sucking that much memory I wonder what it's doing. I have a macbook with 1gb of ram but tested a 512mb model too, it was almost as snappy as mine.

I'd guess the school's admin has set up something to use the macbooks for distributed computing, I can't honestly think of anything else they'd need to run sed for on a 7th graders laptop.
They have some backup program that backs up the computer when it is at school, every fifteen minutes. :eek:
 
Back
Top