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iMac running slow

A

APtalent

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 5, 2010
228
0
I have the late fall 2010 27" model and it's running extremely slow at start-up. I don't have anything booting up at start up and the memory usage seems to be fine.

It's sluggish in the first 10 minutes of booting. Finder occasionally freezes and right clicking to 'get info' takes up to 30 seconds. Firefox lags when switching tabs and minimizing.

After the first 10 minutes, the iMac seems to normalize and runs fine. Any app or utility that may help eliminate this sluggishness?
 
You need to go into Activity Monitor and check to see if anything is using resources--should be easy to spot--check "all processes" CPU use.
 
Well everything seems to be fine,

screenshot20110417at113.png
 
My advice is clone the internal hdd with super duper to an external hdd. then go to preferences and boot with the external hdd if it works and all your info is on the external.


reformat the internal using the external as the boot drive.

then do a fresh install
then boot with the internal only having a fresh install if it works poorly you have a hardware issue
most likely the internal hdd is going bad.
if it works fast then something in your software is bad.

since you have a perfect clone of the "bad" drive you can transfer 1 program at a time to figure what slows you...


one other thing can be the problem if you have lots of gear attached to the imac.

now if lots of stuff is hooked up to the imac detach all of it and see how it runs.
 
i would probably just do an archive and install. it only takes 30 mins and it wont delete any of your user data, just reinstall the OS

that could solve a lot of your problems
 
Drewbie said:
i would probably just do an archive and install. it only takes 30 mins and it wont delete any of your user data, just reinstall the OS

that could solve a lot of your problems
Click to expand...

He could also just insert his SL disk and install SL that way, a second upgrade install.
 
APtalent said:
I don't understand? I have Snow Leopard, what would I "upgrade install" to?
Click to expand...

consider it a repair install. if you choose to do that, you can configure the installer to preserve user accounts and settings or something along that line.

when done, run software update from the  menu to bring your system up to date.

alternatively, you could download and install the Mac OS X 10.6.7 Combo update, but you might want to run the combo while booted into safe mode. repair permissions before and after.
 
Sorry for the late reply. I did the repair install last week and the issue hasn't been resolved. I also installed Onyx and did some maintenance.

Just to be clear, when the mac boots, firefox is painfully SLOW to start. Lots of beachballing. Finder also hangs up and the whole system becomes irresponsive. I'm then forced to quite Firefox and restart it. After some 5 minutes everything settles down with the occasional lag. After 10 more minutes, everything normalizes.

There are no login start-up items and the Activity Monitor shows no memory hogging process. I upgraded it to 16 GBs of ram 4 days ago also.
 
If you have not yet done so, suggest upgrading Firefox version to 4.0.1. I am perusing the iMac postings in anticipation of placing an order for one. I currently use an older Vaio notebook with XP. I would experience dramatic slowdowns with Firefox, especially with multiple tabs open. The new version has been dramatic change with this browser.
 
Michaelgtrusa said:
This sounds like a bad HD. I had this happen. You need a new HD.
Click to expand...

You're right. I recently made a thread on it. I checked under Disk Utility and my HDD needs a prompt replacement. Will schedule an appointment by the end of next week.
 
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