2011 15-inch macbook pro question

Hi, I used to have a 2010 mbp with core i7/8gb ram which I gave to my wife. The one thing that drove me crazy about that particular mbp was getting the spinning beach ball of death! I'd click a link in safari or do something in itunes and would get the spinning ball for 2 minutes. I kept saying to myself with 8gb this shouldn't be happening. Well, I'm in the market for a new laptop, and of course am thinking of the mbp, and was wondering if I get an ssd for the mbp will I ever see that spinning beach ball again?
Its pretty ironic when itunes under windows works better than on my 2010 mbp. So I don't want to buy one and get frustrated by that spinning beach ball. Thanks!

 

beachballs have little to do with hdd/ssd. I get piles of them as well, but ive never thought of iTunes in windows as better, im always calling it crap bloatware.

beachballs ate more app/os/backgrouns functions or using too fast of ram that does not downclock right

 

You need to troubleshoot what is pulling the spinning ball notice - you can do this via Activity Monitor and look at what process(es) or applications are stealing all the cpu cycles when it happens.

The beachball is the Windows equivalent of the terminally spinning hourglass, which happens in MS for similar reasons - something is eating up all the cpu cycles and preventing your clicked request from being processed.

 

Hi KCETech1, I figured it was the slow hdd causing the busy state, since I had 8gb and the 8gb came from apple. I also meant that itunes works better in windows because you never get the spinning ball in itunes for windows. Also in itunes for windows you can right-click and add a whole album to a playlist, in mac os its like a few steps more to do this. I really like the mbp's, the 2010 one I gave my wife was my second. But that busy state drove me nuts. Do you think the new quad core mbp's would be better than my dual-core mbp? Thanks!

 

I upgraded my RAM as well and it seemed the computer seemed slower. Over all, what I have seen is that the OS X Lion upgrade has slowed down my start up and program load up times compared to Snow Leapord, so I would give the 10.7 2.5 out of 5.0.

 

I would do a fresh install: wipe hard drive and install fresh, not over top.

 

you have 8gb of memory but might as well want to consider consider HDD rpm and the processes running in the background which is really causing the problem. it would be a good idea to scrub the disk and get a fresh re install of the OSX

 

This is actually the first time I have come across this notion especially since it counters my own experience over the last 8 years (ever since iTunes for Windows was made available). Right now, my early 2011 MBP runs iTunes smoother than my desktop at work which is a Win 7 machine. It boots faster on my MBP (despite iTunes being installed on my desktop's small 80GB SSD drive), it works with my larger library without hanging, I have never had to force close it, and I can keep going on. I am also not sure how you are trying to add music to a playlist especially since it is the same for both platforms. I can easily right-click on a song to add it to a playlist under OS X just as I can in Windows.

Although the quad-core MBPs are nice, that isn't something that you should consider unless you are actually going to require a quad-core CPU. The hangs you were experiencing aren't due to the CPU in your 2010 MBP but rather other factors that have been pointed out. As others have stated, you might want to perform a fresh re-install of OS X to see if that helps. I would also use Disk Utility to scan the hard drive and see if there are any errors. I don't really recommend upgrading to a faster RPM hard drive especially since I didn't notice any difference going from the stock 5400RPM drive in my MBP to a 7200RPM hard drive. Instead, if you are going to upgrade the hard drive, I would save put everything towards an SSD since that will drastically increase performance.