Starting to ask if there's a way back from Mavericks - embracing Windows 8.

I should do some net research, but the latest update from Apple seems to have increased the overhead on this Macbook to the point where having 5 or 6 tabs in use with Firefox, plus entourage and Skype running causes the fans to start going. Scrolling around in Firefox is distinctly jerky and Lightroom also runs even slower.

I'll try it to the end of the week, but it looks like a step too far on this hardware. An 8GB memory upgrade would help, but returning to OSX 10.8 in a fresh install might be a more cost-effective way of restoring performance.*


Conversely Adobe Lightroom 5.2 on Windows 8 was a revelation compared to 5.3 on OSX. While there was the odd bit of lag, I was able to clone out a dozen items, then draw extensively across the image with the brush with a quite acceptable degree of lag. Gone was the frustration of adjusting noise reduction and wondering whether the change had been made or not yet, this was so different.

This morning I did some final setting up & installation to the new install before leaving for work, before finding it was inviting me to download & install Windows 8.1 - hopefully that will go in OK and the machine will be a bit more robust. Windows 8 seemed very susceptible to things not going exactly right, and since starting this I've found that trying to do things while any kind of installation process is going on is likely to lead to hangs or crashes, and on one occasion damage to the OS from which it never seemed to recover properly - one of the reasons for this additional round of re-installation.

Talking of which, the Western Digital 1TB 'Green' drive I put it on this time is almost silent compared to that old 250GB Seagate, and noticeably faster too. Hard drive performance apparently doesn't affect Lightroom (according to an optimisation video from Adobe running from SSD makes no difference except in startup time) since presumable all the modules are loaded into ram. To get the best performance you need the fastest processors and at least 16GB ram. Having investigated a little more, it seems that the processor in my home computer is a lowly socket 775 model, released as a lower-mid range unit in 2008, and I wonder, considering this computer was sold as a performance model 3 years ago, if the original purchasers didn't get 'done'. The only place I'll find an upgrade now is on ebay.

Still debating over memory purchasing, but don't really want to spend more money on computing right now.

*Edit
Apparently Spotlight was still indexing my external drives. There's somewhere north of a terabyte of data shared between the 2 partitions, pretty much all of it small files, documents and spreadsheets, images etc and it's taken several hours to just grind through. This wasn't my discovery BTW, but a few seconds in google and a couple of clicks. Apparently there is sometimes a warning that comes up after installation telling a new user their machine will be slow at first, but I don't recall seeing that or consider 6 hours of up time 'a while'.

Ho hum - I'll know better next time - wonder if it's sorted now?