[OT] Mac Beach Ball Party (or welcome to hell, here's your mac)

[stephen barncard]

my statements may have appeared contradictory in the previous message.

1. I did a apple store* Lion 10.7.4* "on top of" a previous installation on
Saturday. 9 hours
2. I did a fresh 10.7.4 re-install on Sunday. 18 hours

re-written:

summary of my 'lost weekend':

1.   Installing apple store* Lion 10.7.4* "on top of" a previous
installation worked better, but still took over 4 minutes to completely
boot up. Some applications will still seem sluggish when starting up. No
beachball though. It took about 9 hours to install. Most disturbing on this
install is the progress indicator, telling me 36 hours at first, but later
settling into alternating between 24 and 12. In other words, progress
indicators don't mean squat.

2.  I finally did a fresh 10.7.4 re-install on Sunday.
A 'fresh' install of 10.7.4 with migrated files will take less than a
minute to completely boot up. Things seem pretty normal now. It took 18
hours for this latest apple store version to install and move all the files
(via migration assistant).   I can imagine it would take a couple of days
if I had a filled 1TB disk and tried to do this.

3. A 'fresh' install of 10.7.4 without migrating my thousands of documents
and hundreds of applications is blindingly fast and boots faster than the
above.

other settings that may help avoid Mr. Beachball and delays:

Turn off the 'size' checkbox and 'show icon preview' in folder prefs, then
click "use as defaults"

Stephen Barncard
San Francisco Ca. USA

more about sqb  <http://www.google.com/profiles/sbarncar>