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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Mac users help please! (1 Viewer)

R

Roger P

Well-known member
Recent convert to Mac and generally very pleased but I am now having some great difficulties with the iMac and Safari.

Our phone line will not support anything more than 1Meg so I'd assumed this was the reason why web pages were loading so slowly but now some pages such as BirdForum can take 2 or 3 mins to load and often BBC news pages stick and won't load at all. I still thought it was my connection until I used an old PC laptop and IE and found pages loaded in an instant. I've used Safari on the laptop and although it is marginally slower than IE it is still perfectly useable on the pc.

Can anyone explain what might be causing this problem please?
 
Hi Roger,

I've not used OSX for a few years now so can't think what the problem might be offhand.

You could try Camino out for a few days, see if the problem is consistent across browsers or not.

Regards,

Andy.
 
Hi, Roger.

I use a (fairly old) Powerbook G4. It used to work OK, but after one Safari update too many I began to have problems. I eventually gave up and downloaded Firefox and that has worked fine. It might be worth you trying that.

Malcolm
 
if you google "web pages slow to load safari" there's quiet a few threads, most point to a dns server issue, worth a trawl through, I am running snow leopard and have the latest safari and find it works as it should but I do tend to use firefox (as I did when I was a PC user)
 
Thanks all for your comments.

Duke Leto said:
if you google "web pages slow to load safari" there's quiet a few threads, most point to a dns server issue, worth a trawl through, I am running snow leopard and have the latest safari and find it works as it should but I do tend to use firefox (as I did when I was a PC user)
Click to expand...

Thanks for this. Yes there do seem to be several users with identical problems. As advised I've reset Safari and (this morning) there has been an improvement although pages still take seconds to load (rather than minutes or not at all). Need to look into DNS issues but with IT skills I'm rather like my mum was with cars in the '60s - no idea where the engine was, asked for help to put petrol in, but boy did she know what the accelerator was for!
 
Hello Roger,

I have a three year old MacBook, which started to run slowly and occasionally "hang" in Safari. When I upgraded to two gigs of memory, I saw a lot of improvement. My iMac came with two gigs, which seems to be the current standard.
You can also try Google's Chrome as your browser.

Happy bird watching,
Arthur Pinewood
 
I had the same problem a couple of years ago, I switched from BT to Tiscali, and also bought a good wireless router. I saw an instant improvement, but i'm not sure which did the trick, the router or the provider.
Jackie
 
As Andrew says above use opendns but I would also increase your memory if its below par you could max it out.

I'm a bit like you living in a rural area and not getting a great service but a few changes to my line and the faceplate where the telephone cable enters the house I've managed to get the broadband speed up from 2m to just over 6m. See this link here if you are able to make this change its worthwhile. The new faceplate if your line will support it has a small circuit that reduces noise on the bell-wire, this RF noise can slow your connection considerably by giving you a poor IP profile. Read the article and try your line out by removing the bell-wire see if you get an improvement.
 
Andrew Rowlands said:
If the DNS server is a potential issue, why not try changing the DNS to use OpenDNS (note the original settings in case you need to reverse it at some stage)?

Andy.
Click to expand...

I use openDNS on a MacBook Pro and have no problems at all, did have some prior to this associated with my provider.

No trouble to change the settings either, although do take not of current - as previously stated.

Phil
 
petectid said:
As Andrew says above use opendns but I would also increase your memory if its below par you could max it out.
Click to expand...

I'm a bit IT illiterate and don't really understand why a ten year old PC running Windows 2000 and an old XP (cheap) laptop should load web pages in fractions of a second whilst £1300 worth of 6 month old Mac (actually with 4GB of memory) should take 5 mins to load the same page! Surely I should be able to browse birdforum with less than 2GB?

I have reset Safari and started to use Firefox and the problem is much reduced on both browsers, although Safari is still the slower of the two. I just like things to work, we are years into the 'Home Computing' revolution and don't see why we constantly have to make excuses for systems that don't work. That's why I went for a Mac and in every respect other than this it seems to have paid off.

petectid said:
I am a bit like you living in a rural area and not getting a great service but a few changes to my line and the faceplate where the telephone cable enters the house I've managed to get the broadband speed up from 2m to just over 6m. See this link here if you are able to make this change its worthwhile. The new faceplate if your line will support it has a small circuit that reduces noise on the bell-wire, this RF noise can slow your connection considerably by giving you a poor IP profile. Read the article and try your line out by removing the bell-wire see if you get an improvement.
Click to expand...

I'll give that a try - thanks for the info.

Roger
 
Mac and Safari

This is probably not going to help you much, but like you, I have a six month old Intel iMac with 4GB memory, running Snow Leopard.
My browser of choice is Safari, which loads instantly, and never gives me any problems.
I am with Alice (Tiscali), which serves me well, but since I live over 4.2km from the "exchange", my maximum download speed is only 1.24 Gb, which cannot be improved upon, but this shouldn't affect your browser.
Check out the various Apple support forums on the Internet, and I am sure that you will find a solution to your problem.

Best of luck!
 
bestboat said:
This is probably not going to help you much, but like you, I have a six month old Intel iMac with 4GB memory, running Snow Leopard.
My browser of choice is Safari, which loads instantly, and never gives me any problems.
I am with Alice (Tiscali), which serves me well, but since I live over 4.2km from the "exchange", my maximum download speed is only 1.24 Gb, which cannot be improved upon, but this shouldn't affect your browser.
Check out the various Apple support forums on the Internet, and I am sure that you will find a solution to your problem.

Best of luck!
Click to expand...

To be clear: things have improved since I took the advice from the recommended google search, I'm just puzzled as to why several people recommend that a possible solution was to increase the memory to more than 2GB simply to surf a simple web page.
 
Can be a number of issues.

Set your preferences up correctly?
I've known Safari be a nuisance with other software running.
Of course there is your cache settings and I think BF clears the cache and cookies every time?
Contention ratios can be an issue... 8pm always seems to be a problem here... too many people online.
How many users online in the household?
Goes on and on...
Good Luck.
 
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