Rave Reviews for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger 1088
druid_getafix writes "The first mass market reviews of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger are trickling in with a big thumbs up for the release. Walt Mossberg of the WSJ says 'Tiger Leaps Out in Front' but complains about slowness of some applications - notably Mail. David Pogue of NYT says 'But with apologies to Mac-bashers everywhere, Spotlight changes everything. Tiger is the classiest version of Mac OS X ever and, by many measures, the most secure, stable and satisfying consumer operating system prowling the earth.' In related news Mossberg also covers the rising incidence of spam/virii in the Windows world and says '...consider dumping Windows altogether and switching to Apple's Macintosh...'. Previous reviews of Tiger were covered on /. earlier."
Re:Java 5? (Score:5, Informative)
Java 5 will be provided as a separate installer, so that folks can upgrade when they're ready.
Expose - Slowness (Score:5, Informative)
One thing I have noticed so far is that Expose seems a lot less fluid than in Panther. Has anyone else noticed this, or am I going mad? The difference is noticable even with only a couple of windows on the desktop.
Other than that it seems nice. My Vodafone 3G card works, and most apps that I have tried. The only thing I can't get working yet is OpenVPN - as the TUN/TAP driver isn't ported yet.
Re:Java 5? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Expose - Slowness (Score:3, Informative)
http://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~nissler/tuntap/ [uni-kl.de]
Could you just grab the source and build it under Tiger?
Re:How do the judge so fast?!? (Score:5, Informative)
Journalists, especially high-profile ones like Mossberg, get preview versions of new gear long before the rest of us specifically so they can review it. They sign non-disclosure agreements to make sure the technology doesn't get into The Wrong Hands, and the vendors generally know the journalists will behave because the journalists have their entire career invested in it. If Mossberg tried to distribute pirated versions of Tiger ahead of the release date, Apple would stop giving him advance copies, and he'd lose prestige as a journalist.
Virii doesn't make you look clever. (Score:2, Informative)
The plural [wikipedia.org] of [reference.com] virus [linuxmafia.com] is viruses.
Writing "virri" doesn't make you look clever, educated people will laugh at you.
Re:Test of the NYT article (Score:5, Informative)
no reg NYT link (Score:2, Informative)
When pointing to the NYT, can you please use the New York Times Link Generator [blogspace.com]! Links are the whole point of the web! While cutting-and-pasting the text is possible it's a bit of a kludge IMHO.
Oracle 10g on Mac OS X (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How are Mac Minis with Tiger? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Is there really a reason to switch? (Score:5, Informative)
That's the top one reason I always keep hearing from multimedia professionals who've switched. What makes them more productive? Workflow management, which seems to be easier in OS X, better handling of files and more freedom and consistency in setting up the perfect work environment. This includes scanning, printing and all color-proofing issues.
For some things it's the difference between one click versus four. For some things it's simply features not available on Windows.
And today it's a lot easier to set keyboard shortcuts just the way you want them and adapt your workflow to your taste. So switching has for the most part become trivial.
I'd say coupled with the cross platform apps you use, there's at least not a compelling reason not to switch. If you personally would gain a lot by switching is another issue.
I know, a pretty wooly answer. In the end it's down to your preferences and way of working. Best talk with fellow designers, see what they think about it, and see if what they say applies to your situation.
DON'T ask the geeks here at
Re:Pity (Score:4, Informative)
The main innovation in Spotlight is incremental searching, not waiting until pressing enter. This allows the user to refine the search on-the-fly, which is a big usability improvement. OK, incremental search is not new. But system-wide incremental search? Now this is a new feature.
Re:W00t, guess i'll go get it! (Score:2, Informative)
unless there's a torrent..
Here you go: Mac OS X Tiger GM XiSO [thepiratebay.org]
Re:How are Mac Minis with Tiger? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How do the judge so fast?!? (Score:4, Informative)
Once Tiger was running I still had to install a few drivers, such as my Unitor 8, and Delta 410.
After that, I reinstalled all my necessary apps like Logic Pro 7 and various soft-synths (Vanguard, Atmosphere, Stylus RMX, etc.) and started beating the hell out of this system.
After a few hours without any problems I concluded that, for my purposes, Tiger kicks ass.
Re:Sounds great, get it out there! (Score:5, Informative)
It should be mentioned that these prices are not comparable directly since Apple split their stock. The current pre-split price is over $70, so its a 7 times gain, not just a 3 times.
Pshaw (Score:4, Informative)
From Beagle's webpage; "Beagle is a search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for. Beagle can search in many different domains:
documents
emails
web history
IM/IRC conversations
source code
images
music files
applications
Have a look at uber hacker Nat Friedman's [nat.org] videos of hot Beagle Action. [nat.org]
In short, beware teh Gnome.
Re:Why can't they test unix for what it is? (Score:5, Informative)
Java 1.5 isn't available yet, but will be soon.
64-bit memory addressing is available for 64-bit backend processes. As the PowerPC can handle 32-bit and 64-bit at the same time, there's no performance cut at all.
I wasn't able to test the final GCC 4.0 yet.
I don't know what you mean by performance problems, outdated hardware and expensive prices.
Re:How are Mac Minis with Tiger? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Is there really a reason to switch? (Score:3, Informative)
I can't tell you why to switch, although the fact that you "would love to" is probably a start.
I got an iBook G4 at home, because I was intrigued by OS X, and because it was actually competitive on features and price for its part of the market. I bought it shortly before I became more interested in digital photography, and iPhoto has been a nice bonus. No regrets, so far.
I got an iMac G5 at work, because I've increasingly been doing Unix development, and it was cumbersome working on a Linux box via SSH and SMB. I seriously considered switching from Windows to Linux, but there was a comfort level with OS X that I've never quite reached with Linux. Also, I wanted a new computer, and I thought it would be easier to get a 20" iMac approved than a desktop and comparable monitor.
I haven't completely switched, but I wouldn't be surprised if I never buy another PC. I'm seriously considering a Power Mac G5 at home. Depending on how much we spend on our next house, it may sit next to a 30" Apple Cinema Display.
Re:Pity (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How are Mac Minis with Tiger? (Score:4, Informative)
The other thing to note is that even if hardware acceleration isn't possible, Apple has optimized their low-level system libraries to provide a suitable (though not as high-performance) substitute. I have the last non-white/non-silver powerbook, and upgraded it to a G4 550, from a G3 500. The speed increase in things that were purely floating point were about 10%, as you'd expect from the bump in CPU speed. But for things that used Altivec (ripping in iTunes and some image processing stuf), the speed increase was anywhere from 25-33%.
I'm curious to see how Tiger will run on this machine. I suspect that it will probably be the last release that officially supports this machine, but heck, it's 5 years old already, and by the time the next release rolls out, I SHOULD get a new PB
you should buy a lottery ticket (Score:2, Informative)
Just about all diehard Windows users I've shown OS X & Mac to are completely won over by it in a matter of minutes or hours. The user experience is rewarding, productive and ... fun! After seeing Tiger's "RSS Visualiser" screensaver - one of the most trivial features - one guy here decided on the spot to sell all his PCs.
For a software developer, OS X is particularly compelling.
Re:No Tiger in Tiger (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How are Mac Minis with Tiger? (Score:5, Informative)
using the mac mini for onstage use for realtime video software because it's so small.
Stuff like Grid, Arkaos and Modul8 will run fine on a mini.
And for a home user a mac mini should be fine for editing and rendering home videos with DV. New versions of those will have core image filters which we want to use.
Re:How are Mac Minis with Tiger? (Score:5, Informative)
Image ops on powermac 1 ghz g4 (Score:4, Informative)
It even edits video ok. All without the core image.
My understanding of core image api is if the machine can't send the operations to the unsupported video card it just uses the main processor. minis have 1.2-1.4 ghz so they should work prety well for any image task thrown at it.
A g5 would improve things for anyone really into hardcore editing..
Re:port to x86? (Score:3, Informative)
A bit of a write-up on the Mac OS X architecture: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/
Re:So what's really new?? (Score:3, Informative)
for the developer, I think CoreData, CoreImage, CoreVideo...
the thing there is that when developers take advantage of this, you will need to upgrade to use the neat new features in those new applications that take advantage of them.
CoreAudio, from panther, made creating audio plug-ins (for logic, live, etc.) relatively easy to build functions that work in a variety of applications as they are based on the architecture of the OS rather than the plug-in architecture of a particular application. (apologies for the sentence structure...)
I would love to see the ability to create image filters that could be used in a variety of manipulation programs, ( btw, is the CoreSet available to darwin?) and have it then be possible to generate a simple image manipulation framework that relied entirely on CoreImage/Video units.
having tried demos recently (of live and logic), it makes it easier to choose the application based on its core usability, rather than the presence of a particular reverb. the Audio Units work the same in both environments. Shake already does something similar, its composite trees are based on nodes, which are themselves based on command line modules, now move that thought out to the OS level, and make it available to every application.
...is it just me or does this seem like small tools and pipes...
and that would be total suicide for Apple (Score:1, Informative)
Also, if Apple did it, they would be more or less forced to do it so that you could dual-boot the system between Windows and OS X (and even if they didn't, people would bitchandmoan and buy programs to make it do that anyway). Then if Windows and OS X are on the same computer, and you are suchandsuch software developer who is probably used to devloping for Windows, there's zero incentive to make an app for OS X, since people can just reboot to get Windows up.
So that leaves Apple with...an iPod and an OS nobody makes software for or buys the hardware for. Nice buisness model.
(for the record, my name is normally Bizitmap, not an anonymous coward, but I'm not on the computer which has my password in autocomplete, and I kinda forgot what it was =3 )
Re:Voice recognition (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slowness (Score:3, Informative)
For what it's worth, I don't find that to be true of iTunes on OS X. Not knowing what you mean by "limited features", I can't address that, but having used iTunes on both Windows and OS X, I can say that OS X is the better environment to run it in. Which shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
Re:Is there really a reason to switch? (Score:3, Informative)
So what would I gain from switching?
I use Adobe and Macromedia applications regularly on both systems. First, you need to make sure your particular applications are well supported on the mac, or it is a non-starter. Adobe has several projects where they have mostly abandoned the mac.
Asssuming you do not use any of these the main advantages are:
Better GUI - UI elements have better feedback and make a lot more sense. (buttons pulse and when the system is working stay lit so you the system registered the click. Windows UI elements don't provide feedback and leave you guessing. Also, dialogue boxes don't say "Cancel/OK" most have useful titles.
System Services - in any native app with 1-3 clicks I can lookup a word or acronym online, translate it to another language, spell check a selection or document, grammar check a selection or document, look it up in a thesuarus, make a graph of data, run a script on it, speak text aloud, etc. You can download these services or they can be offered by applications or the OS.
Freeware - There is a pile of real and useful freeware on OS X. No really, good, free software from linux as well as mac native applications are made and distributed for free. The free dev tools have prompted thousands of developers to write useful free applications that are in some cases better than anything (even commercial offerings) available on Windows.
I use a number of OS's each day, but i gravitate to OS X as my default because I can get more done with less frustration. I'm not sure how serious you are, or if you would prefer OS X. Some people get very used to doing things one particular way and the time and effort required to get used to doing things differently is just too much for them. Good luck!
Re:Voice recognition (Score:3, Informative)
The sort of speech recognition software bundled with operating systems in the past have traditionally been of a very substandard quality, and with limited scope for training to improve (the idea that you can use it immediately without *any* speech rec training worries me immensely, as people have sufficient variety in accents that regional differences could mean the product works or doesn't - maybe it works best if you're from South California?).
Still, like I say, I'd be very interested to see how good Tiger's support is. Apple has been making leaps and bounds with its accessibility support (which SR is essentially a component of, even if they're not marketing it as such) so an SR component of the OS with OS-level integration and commercial quality accuracy would make Tiger *the* killer accessible OS. If it isn't already, that is.
Steve Jobs Quote.... (Score:3, Informative)
Market share is "a lot less important than it once was," Mr. Jobs says. "I'm not sure it matters."
Re:How is Spotlight any different.. (Score:4, Informative)
Spotlight also has a plugin architecture so that developers can add new file format parsers.
Re:Pity (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Is there really a reason to switch? (Score:3, Informative)
I'd say you're stretching it just a tad too much. I took me about a month to get used to OS X, and that's coming from a unix background. And I'm still learning lots of little things that make people frustrated because they automagically think they already know what they are doing.
Yes, productivity will go down, for a short while. It'll take about a week to get comfortable, a couple weeks to get where you already are, and then there will lots of little details that bug you because little things aren't the same.
Re:can it run doom 3? (Score:2, Informative)
Watch out, they're cathing up...
Re:Poor Memory Handling? (Score:3, Informative)
Virtual memory does not mean "swapped out" memory. It simply means "allocated memory space". As long as you do not actually use this memory, it's free for other programs to use, will not cause any swapping and does not consume any RAM whatsoever.
use vmmap <pid> to get the memory map of an actual application. At the end, you'll get something like
All ReadOnly portions can be shared with other applications.Sleeper hit feature - parental controls (Score:3, Informative)
This feature was mentioned in both stores and I had not even noticed it before. But they sure seemed to be impressed by it, enough to mention it right alongside the major new features like spotlight or dashboard.
Personally I am a little creeeped out but the thought of parents exceting this much control over kids lives - I don't have kids but I'd like to imagine I would allow them more freedom than this. But parents are doing this kind of stuff anyway and I suppose on the plus side for kids parents will never notice when these features have been circumvented or they start talking in code. And any feature that drives kids to be more crafty has to be good as far as I'm concerned...
Re:Voice recognition (Score:3, Informative)
The Mac mini takes ordinary DDR RAM, not SODIMMs. I picked up a 1G stick for under AU$150 on the weekend. You can get a 5400 RPM laptop drive for pretty cheap as well, but I grabbed a 7200 RPM Hitachi Travelstar for AU$220, and put the existing drive in an external USB2 HDD enclosure (cost: AU$11). I have no need for a Superdrive, as I'll use my PC for burning DVDs.
The Mac mini is a great bedroom PC. It's quiet, small, and unobtrusive. If I want to take it to work, I can just chuck it in my bag. Plus, it runs OS X, which I am still impressed by. For around AU$1200 I have a souped-up mini-computer, an 80GB external HDD, and a spare 256MB RAM stick, which has been put to good use in my parent's PC.
Maybe it's still a little expensive for a second PC, but considering how happy I am with it, the Mac mini seems like a cheap gadget when compared to the my $AU600 PDA. Furthermore, most people would not need to soup up the Mac mini, and would only need the base model with a RAM upgrade to 512MB.
Re:Is there really a reason to switch? (Score:2, Informative)
FYI...I am an Apple VAR so your millage may vary.
I would say, that for the small business, Tiger is a super choice.
Maybe not on the desktop but as an office server. The hype has been going to the Client version, but OS X server should really be a hit.
Why? Support for native windows ACL's! You will no longer be limited to the Posix User, Group, Everyone permissions. Easy of setup. There is one interface to control all of the Apple supported Services( AFP, SMB, Web, Application Server, Mail ). XGrid...XSan.... the list goes on.
Re:Pshaw (Score:4, Informative)
SpotLight is not just metadata plus content. It's also about relationships between objects. You can create relationships by dragging objects about (say a picture of a dog onto an email to family members) and SpotLight remembers them in detail (the dog metadata in the image is then in a relationship with the people in the email address fields, as well as the email itself and any objects inside it).
This seems like a new thing to me.
Re:Java 5? (Score:3, Informative)
Got all that?
Re:Aging Panther Installs will Break Tiger Upgrade (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Spotlight Shortcut (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sounds great, get it out there! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Image ops on powermac 1 ghz g4 (Score:3, Informative)
Neat, when did Photoshop 7 get real-time, non-destructive effects? I don't even have them in Photoshop 8.
All CoreImage units are written to take advantage of the new QuartzExtreme layer. About three quarters of those are written to degrade to AltiVec if you don't have a supported GPU. About a third of the CoreImage units run fine under software rendering. If you have a Mac with a G4 that supports QuartzExtreme but doesn't have a GPU for CoreImage you'll only be missing out on a few effects. Most notably the ripple effect.
The ripple effect makes my nipples hard.
liar, liar, pants on fire (Score:2, Informative)
I have a G5 Powerbook at work...
Unless this guy works in the Apple skunkworks, this is highly impossible. Nice try, troll. The rest of his post is suspect as well... The OS X native version of Office sucks?!? Wonder why MS's Mac OS X development team keeps receiving accolades for it...
Seth
I'm seeing this, too! (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, I absolutely have noticed the slowness. I'm sitting here on my dual G5 2.0GHz with 1.5GB RAM and (what I thought was) a decent graphics card and its definitely a LOT less smooth than in Panther.
Another thing that I've noticed is a problem with font smoothing on my home machine, a Quicksilver G4 with a GeForce3 card. For some reason, most of my fonts look like total crap [island.nu]. I've tried every permutation of the font smoothing settings but nothing seems to help. Has anyone else seen this problem?
A long running factual error by Mossberg (Score:2, Informative)
This has been stated [wsj.com] by Mossberg and not contradicted in at least the first few Google results.
And the standard delete key on a Mac works like the backspace key, not the delete key, in Windows. Mac desktop keyboards have a second, Windows-type delete key, but Mac laptops lack one.
This is 50% true. If you hold Function and push backspace, you get the desired forward-delete. There are two problems with this: a) it isn't labeled directly on the keyboard and b) it is ugly to describe. But I assure you it becomes habit very quickly.
Re:Pity (Score:5, Informative)
A year ago, my friend George e-mailed me a funny picture of an elephant walking through snow. (It had snowed at a zoo. The picture was funny.) The other day, I wanted to see that picture, but I couldn't remember where I'd put it, or even if I'd put it anywhere at all.
I tried Spotlighting "elephant" and "snow," but the photo was probably named DCS1003 or something, and I never got around to annotating it with a caption or anything. So that didn't help.
Then I tried searching for George's e-mail address. That didn't help either, because George has sent me thousands of e-mails.
So I typed the following query into Spotlight: "George kind:image".
Poof. There was the picture. Spotlight knew to associate the picture with George because he's the one who e-mailed it to me. So it found it.
(This whole example was totally made up. But I just tested it on my Mac, and it really does what I said it does. George is not his real name, but part about the elephant is true.)
Bad for QT Pro users (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Test of the NYT article (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Apple Strategy (Score:3, Informative)
Once again time for me to dust off and repost this:
----------
Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why OS X works so well is because it runs on such a limited pool of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding OS X to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the x86 world, where a machine could be using one of thousands of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Windows developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. OS X developers code for specific hardware. Even the version of NeXTStep that ran on Intel hardware ran on a tiny subset of the available PC hardware. If your CD-ROM drive and motherboard weren't on the "supported hardware" list that came with NeXTStep, you were SOL.
That little fantasy you all have of buying "Mac OS X for x86", running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass. Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go.
Do you think Jobs could just snap his fingers one day and a few months later have a product on the shelves that would run perfectly on every PC capable of running XP today? It's impossible. And even if it were possible, you wouldn't buy it. Why? Because Apple uses their software to sell their hardware, so a copy of OS X for x86 would have to be priced to ease the pain of a lost hardware sale-- you'd either do without it and bitterly bitch about the price here on
~Philly
Re:I don't understand nobody's talking about (Score:4, Informative)
The fundamental object in Automator is the action. Think of an action like an old-fashioned Unix command-line utility like "sort" or "uniq." Each one has an input and an output, kind of like "stdin" and "stdout" but more discriminating.
Using Automator, you string together actions to create workflows. Workflows are kind of like pipelines. You start with one that generates some kind of output, then pass that output to another action, then to another, then to another.
Example: Let's say you have ten pictures on your desktop, and you want to resize them all and add metadata like a copyright notice, something that's common to all 10. You go to Automator and start with the "Get selected Finder items" action, then click on the "Scale images" action, then click in the "Add Spotlight comments to Finder items" action. When you select the files and run the workflow, it does what you want.
A more complex, real-world example. I use InCopy a lot. One of the things I always have to do is take an InCopy document, map styles to XML tags, export the document as XML, then run the resulting XML file through a little utility to strip out some InCopy weirdness that Adobe inserts. This is a fairly manually intensive process. I automated a chunk of it with an AppleScript about eighteen months ago when InCopy 3 first came out, but I still had to do the fiddly stuff by hand. Last fall, I created an Automator workflow that would let me call that AppleScript ("Run AppleScript" is an Automator action), then pass the output on to a pipeline of actions that processed it in just the way I needed. I now use that workflow several times every day.
Like I said, normal people get it pretty quickly. Geeks seem to try to overthink it, to think about it in terms of object models and scripting.
Re:Pshaw (Score:2, Informative)
No, you can't.
That's a potential future of Spotlight, but not a current capability.
Re:Poor Memory Handling? (Score:3, Informative)
Dashboard clients are little Web Views, which means they rely on Web Kit. Web Kit is a shared framework; it only gets loaded into memory once.
It's possible that whatever you were using to measure that reported the memory usage of Web Kit once per Dashboard client, which is not correct.
Re:Folders (Score:4, Informative)
Um. I really don't want you to buy Tiger and then be disappointed.
Spotlight isn't a general-purpose annotation system. In order for you to apply metadata to files, you have to have three things. First, a file format that supports metadata. (Metadata is actually stored inside files.) Two, an application that supports adding metadata. And finally, you have to have a Spotlight importer that extracts the metadata.
Example: Adobe has not yet shipped (for some bafflingly reason) their importers for their file formats. These importers will be able to read XMP metadata and store it in Spotlight. But right now, they're not available. So if you want to add Spotlight-savvy metadata to an InDesign file, you are completely out of luck. It can't be done, no way, no how.
Spotlight is great. I love Spotlight. Spotlight has changed the way I work. But if you go into it hoping that Spotlight is gonna do a whole bunch of things that it's just not equipped to do right now, you're going to be pissed. And I don't want you to be pissed.
Now, that said, you can group all JPEG files together based on width and height criteria. That works fine. And you can use Spotlight comments to store free-form, unstructured metadata. But don't hope that Spotlight is a general-purpose file annotation system. It's not. At least not in this release.
Re:Voice recognition (Score:1, Informative)
As a New Zealander, I've tried and tried to use Panther's voice command recognition (mainly for chess playing
Doesn't matter how clearly I speak, whether slow or fast, it won't recognise simple commands, or it gets them wrong.
Stupid computer OS. If they are going to have it, maybe they should make it so it can recognise clear English from anywhere?
(I'm a damn sight more understandable than a Texan accent, or some Brooklyn guy in real life
Re:Expose - Slowness (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mail.app ate my mail (Score:2, Informative)
Then restart Mail. It will then work. I found that an HTTP Mail bundle I had installed some time ago caused the new Mail app to do this. Once I removed it all was fine.
Re:Is there really a reason to switch? (Score:3, Informative)
All the Microsoft applications support drag&drop how it should be supported, even creating 'clippings' (Mac term; I don't know what they are called in Windows) on the desktop if you drag there. The problem is that almost *no* third party applications make use of drag&drop, even though all the APIs for it are exposed for them to use whenever they feel like.
Part of the Mac culture is that *all* the software is of a more consistant quality. You can be assured that your $10 shareware application supports drag&drop as easily as your $400 office suite. I don't know if that's because MacOS attracts better programmers, or because Apple's development tools are so much easier to use, but that's pretty much the facts.
Additionally, Mac users tend to pick applications based on which have better GUIs... you very rarely see this behavior on Windows, where people will use abominations like Trillian and proclaim it the best thing ever.
performance suggestions (Score:2, Informative)
Your experience is out of the oridinary. Here's how MacAddict reviewed Office v.X [macaddict.com] in 2002-- Here's Wired's review of Office [wired.com] for Mac OS X-- Since you're using a powerbook, which is what I also am using, I've got two suggestions that might improve your performance in Office-- Install 512mb of ram if you are trying to get by with 256mb. Also, if you've enabled filevault, disable it. I just don't believe your experience is the norm. Hopefully these suggestions will help.
Seth