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iMac Seems Slow...

carfac

carfac

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 18, 2006
1,241
29
Hi:

my 20" is my first Mac, so I have no frame of reference, other than PC's... so maybe you can help...

Everyone on here alweays seems to talk about how fast the intel iMacs are, blah blah blah... That is not my experience so far.

Finder (which is Universal, right?) opens right up, but when you start getting down into some directories, it may take 5 seconds or more to display...

I had two bvrowsers open (FF or Safari, I forgot- maybe both...), and I was dragging some text from one into a form on the other, and the computer ran 1/2 to 1 second behind me. Just enough to be incredibnly annoying!

I notice when cutting and pasting, I see the menu bar flash, like it's running extra steps to accmplish a cut n' paste.

Right now, I only have the base 512m card, should upgrade soon. I know mem should make things better, but I am curious what others thought- will mem help these, or is this really fast for a Mac?
 
More RAM. 512 is just barely enough..

Beyond that, make sure the processor is set to Highest in the Energy Saver prefpane. (in System Preferences)
 
Make sure you don't have any background apps running, ie. norton autoprotect. As to the finder lagg, this can sometimes be blamed for those directories not beings cached and so the hard disk has to spin up again.
 
It just hit me- the word that describes how I feel this computer runs is "sluggish."

Anyway, I never have many apps running, a couple things in Dash (the ones that come with Apple, nothing new) and one or two other, minor progs... things like Text, NOT things like Photoshop....

I am NOT trolling or trying to start an arguement, but I run 5-10 progs at a time in WIN, usually 3-5 BIG ones (IE, Excel, Photoshop) wuth 512, ands Win handles it a lot better...

ANyway, mem will make thi snappier you REALLY think?
 
The extra RAM should speed things up, but I would also ask if you are leaving it on continuously/sleeping the iMac or switching on and off. If the former, as with all computers a full restart every few days should clear things up and speed up the system.

As for the flashes when cutting and pasting, it's normal and merely refers to the action and where the corresponding menu item is on the bar. I like it, a nice visual representation to let you know it has actually done what you have asked of it. It happens with all shortcuts. Just now to prove it to myself, I highlighted this reply text, cmd-x and cmd-v'd it and edit flashed both times in Camino. I went to finder, highlighted the public folder and cmd-x'd it with no flash, checked the edit menu and indeed Cut wasn't available as an option. Cmd-c worked okay and I had seen that Copy was allowed. Went back to Camino and pressed cmd-y and up popped the History after a little flash of the view menu.
 
carfac said:
I am NOT trolling or trying to start an arguement, but I run 5-10 progs at a time in WIN, usually 3-5 BIG ones (IE, Excel, Photoshop) wuth 512, ands Win handles it a lot better...
Click to expand...

I just bought a 512 stick with $ from my own pocket for this PC here at work. It was sluggish and is much snappier with 1GB.

carfac said:
ANyway, mem will make thi snappier you REALLY think?
Click to expand...

I REALLY think so, yes. ;)
 
I have the 17" iMac, albeit with 2GB RAM, and it's definitely not sluggish. That's how I would describe my Dell D810 laptop (also with 2GB RAM). The iMac just seems more responsive. Today I downloaded and unzipped a Zip file containing the Struts source code. Using windows explorer to navigate through it, it was taking 20 seconds to open each subfolder ... that's untypical, but pretty annoying. I'm not sure why - perhaps the virus checker :rolleyes: was doing a scan. I didn't check and it's not doing that now.

I usually have several apps open, for instance on my Dell laptop I'm running a couple of explorer windows, notepad, cygwin, a VMWare VM running Linux, Outlook, Gimp, eclipse and a couple of Firefox windows. That's pretty typical of my usage on the iMac, except replace explorer by Finder, notepad by TextWrangler, cygwin by X11, VMWare by Parallels and Outlook by Entourage.
 
carfac said:
Hi:

my 20" is my first Mac, so I have no frame of reference, other than PC's... so maybe you can help...

Everyone on here alweays seems to talk about how fast the intel iMacs are, blah blah blah... That is not my experience so far.

Finder (which is Universal, right?) opens right up, but when you start getting down into some directories, it may take 5 seconds or more to display...

I had two bvrowsers open (FF or Safari, I forgot- maybe both...), and I was dragging some text from one into a form on the other, and the computer ran 1/2 to 1 second behind me. Just enough to be incredibnly annoying!

I notice when cutting and pasting, I see the menu bar flash, like it's running extra steps to accmplish a cut n' paste.

Right now, I only have the base 512m card, should upgrade soon. I know mem should make things better, but I am curious what others thought- will mem help these, or is this really fast for a Mac?
Click to expand...

macworld, may issue, addresses the big claims

on some things, the imac with native apps is faster, on other native things, it's about the same, and yes on other native things, it's actually slower

the review gave the intel imac 4 out of 5 mice, but the review read like a 2 1/2 mice review...they certainly were not wowed by this product the same way they were with most ipods and the mini

on rosetta, the imac is noticeably slower

i am ok with my 20 inch intel imac and know it will show its true potential once more software titles come out native to this machine
 
jefhatfield said:
macworld, may issue, addresses the big claims

on some things, the imac with native apps is faster, on other native things, it's about the same, and yes on other native things, it's actually slower

the review gave the intel imac 4 out of 5 mice, but the review read like a 2 1/2 mice review...they certainly were not wowed by this product the same way they were with most ipods and the mini

on rosetta, the imac is noticeably slower

i am ok with my 20 inch intel imac and know it will show its true potential once more software titles come out native to this machine
Click to expand...
True, not all apps are native yet, some are but not optimised, but Finder should be okay and I certainly don't struggle with opening sub-folders.
 
Do you have iDisk? I've found that can really slow lots of finder operations. But my iMac with 1 GB RAM doesn't seem to have the problems you've described.
 
Thanks!

I just wantyed to make sure that the mem was a REAL solution, and not wasting money- I mean, even at Crucial, a Gig is a chunk of change!

I do like the iMac a LOT!
 
FF_productions said:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/198072/
This thread applies to you..
Click to expand...

i remember the days when 256 megs of ram was huge ;)

my dual G4 power mac has a gig of ram and i am happy, then i talk to a kid, actually professional and successful graphic designer (meh, i draw stick figures), upped his dual G5 from two gigs to four gigs and that's where he saw the difference

512 megs to one gig on tiger...nah, no big deal

one gig to two gigs...ok, there's some improvement

two gigs to four gigs...that's the ticket with tiger and cs suite with multiple apps opened

only problem with me, it's a bit pricey but apple didn't make the G5 power mac able to hold loads of gigs for nothing...i think it won't be long before the imac and macbook pro will be able to hold more gigs of ram for those who want to open multiple, big time adobe apps simultaneously
 
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