I just had my MacBook returned from service and copied my old user folder into /Users and everything worked fine as expected. But even though the machine is really new, only 20% space is being used, and I am running with tons of ram and a fast SSD the user experience is really lacking: at times Mail.app will hang between tabbing between the To and Subject lines, using Safari/Firefox will also have noticable lag when tabbing and just generally the machine seems to hang a bit every now and then (irrespective of program).
When creating a fresh new user the experience is something else completely - everything is superfast, no lagging when entering data in fields, and no "spinning color balls" (whatever they might be called).
I always have the Activity Monitor running in the dock, so I can see I am barely using any CPU - any idea on what can cause the lagging behaviour in the various programs?
/Applications/causes it to hang when it's opened. (~/Applications/Utilities/is fine though.) Is Spotlight indexing, or has it finished indexing yet? – Lri Apr 27 '11 at 13:55fs_usage -f filesysin Terminal to see what paths get accessed when it's "lagging"? What (background/menubar) applications do you run? Do you keep applications in~/Applications? – Daniel Beck Apr 27 '11 at 18:03