Not sure if this is an appropriate topic, but I'm hoping for some guidance.
Brand new MBP w 2.8ghz, 4g ram, 500g HD. All I have on it is lightroom 2.5. I think I have it as 64 bit. I've imported 11,000 images, mostly 10 or 12MB raw files with a fair number of companion jpegs. I'm finding the machine seems to get over whelmed while doing simple editing and the track pad becomes unresponsive until it catches up, or the spinning ball shows up for a few seconds before the screen will go to 1:1 view. This seems to be the case fairly often. I'm used to editing on a mac pro tower that is at least a couple of years old and don't feel anywhere near the frustrations with it.
I guess I want to know if others have the same performance issues or if there are tricks or fixes I should try. I really expected this notebook to kick a--. I thought I wouldn't be able to bog it down until I threw serious video at it. I thought I was over buying from a performance standpoint.

Thanks for any and all advice,
Stuart

Which OS are you using ? Snow Leopard is said to make those MBPs fly but it is buggy.

I've got the previous version but I've noticed recently that my MBP bogs down occasionally in a range of applications. The rest of the time it goes quite nicely. I haven't had my wits about me sufficiently to determine what I did or what upgrade I applied to what to make it happen, but the cpu and RAM usage are well below 100%.

I haven't used LR 2 recently and so I cannot comment on the present performance of that particular application but it used to run ok.

- Alan

thanks Alan,
I'm using 10.6 as that's what they come with now(it's only a week old). I'm even seeing the spinning ball sometimes waiting for a web page to close. It doesn't seem right to me. I'll try to talk to the apple guys, but I'm afraid they will just blame non apple software and say its not their problem.
stuart

I will be eagerly looking for responses on this. I am looking at buying my first mac and I am considering is the 15 " macbook pro since it is neither too big nor too small.
Vijay

Something is definitely up, it could be lightroom, it could be a missing hard drive update you need.

Do you have your graphics card set to dedicated or embedded? Do you work with the power adapter plugged in? Are you booted into 64 bit kernel mode?

If you can reproduce it consistently, there's no reason you shouldn't take it in to the apple store and show them in person.

I have an appointment this afternoon at Apple.
can you elaborate on hard drive update as this is the orig HD in a new mac...
I'm working plugged in and with the higher performance graphic card chosen.
I've selected 64 bit with lightroom, but I'm not aware of a boot selection as far as the OS. Am I missing a key step? I just checked system profiler and it says "yes" under 64 bit, so I think its booted up as 64 bit.
thanks
stuart

Just sounds like Lightroom to me. It's not particularly well optimized for catalogs that size and does tend to slow to a crawl. The official Adobe solution is to use multiple catalogs when you start seeing performance issues.

If you've got the space to spare, try importing all those images into Lightroom 3 and see how it runs.

On the other hand, you could simply be into the slower part of the disk. How much free space do you have?

I have 316gigs left on the HD. I wouldn't think that's the problem yet. I use LR 2.4 on my tower with a much larger catalog.
I haven't heard how LR 3 is running yet. any feedback??
thanks,
stuart

Hold down 6 and 4 while booting up to boot into 64 bit kernel. See if there is anything different in your performance, I doubt there will be since you don't have more than 4gb of ram - but it's worth checking.

Here's a link to the HD update:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/32786/apple-performance-update-%28snow-leopard%29

thanks again for the help.
Apple replaced the laptop and put the same drive in the new one. I will have to spend some more time on the machince to verify things are better, but I've got my fingers crossed. I will report back.
there was an update that applies directly to the spinning ball/ hang up.
I will look into the HD update also.
Stuart

SMJ,

Not normal behavior for a machine with those specs. First update to 10.6.1. Second, make sure you have the hard drive firmware update at http://support.apple.com/downloads/#macbookpro Your symptoms sound a lot like what that fix is supposed to cure. I'm running Aperture with 5X the images you report with no hanging.

Robert