Brand New Mac Book Pro, AE not Performing

Hello,

I am using a brand new Mac Book Pro (2.7 GHz i7; 16 GB RAM  NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB). I am in AE 11.0.0378 (CS6).  It is very very slow. Every few seconds I get the yellow loading bar even when the playhead is sitting over a solid with a basic shape, not even playing. When I try preview render I get a warning that AE "needs at least two frames for playback." I've set up my multiprocessor to render multiple frames simultaneously and allocated as many gigs of RAM as possible to AE. This is strange.

When I go to "About After Effect" I see "4% used of 16gb"

Any guidance here?

Thanks!

Johnny