Late 2013 iMac keeps freezing

[PR0WN3D]

Since about 3 years ago our late "21in 2013 iMac has been slowing down a lot and I have checked everything and nothing seems to be wrong. About a week ago I came back from school and went to do some homework on our family mac. For a while, it worked fine, but then it froze for no apparent reason, and after about 10 seconds it unfroze and it did that about every 10 minutes. Also, web pages started to not load and would get stuck on loading and then would give me an error saying the page is no longer responding after 5 minutes. As the days went on the times of the freezing kept increasing and the delay before each freeze decreased. At the time of writing this, our family mac freezes for about 2 minutes and freezes every 30 seconds. Right now I am writing this on an old laptop that I have found because our mac is pretty much unusable from how much it freezes. My mom and I are deciding to take our mac to the apple store to see what's wrong with it and why it keeps freezing. If anyone knows why, please tell me. Any replies will be greatly appreciated, Thank You.

 

[macpro2000]

Your hard drive is dying bud.

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

If they are going to replace the drive, only install an SSD.

 

[macpro2000]

They won't install anything in it that wasn't originally in it. But buy an SSD from OWC.com and follow the install videos. Piece of cake.

 

[Zdigital2015]

Since about 3 years ago our late "21in 2013 iMac has been slowing down a lot and I have checked everything and nothing seems to be wrong. About a week ago I came back from school and went to do some homework on our family mac. For a while, it worked fine, but then it froze for no apparent reason, and after about 10 seconds it unfroze and it did that about every 10 minutes. Also, web pages started to not load and would get stuck on loading and then would give me an error saying the page is no longer responding after 5 minutes. As the days went on the times of the freezing kept increasing and the delay before each freeze decreased. At the time of writing this, our family mac freezes for about 2 minutes and freezes every 30 seconds. Right now I am writing this on an old laptop that I have found because our mac is pretty much unusable from how much it freezes. My mom and I are deciding to take our mac to the apple store to see what's wrong with it and why it keeps freezing. If anyone knows why, please tell me. Any replies will be greatly appreciated, Thank You.

Download DriveDx for Binary Fruit - https://binaryfruit.com - install and open it. It will give you a bunch of stats on the state of your HDD/SSD, etc. It should tell you whether you are having SMART failures with the drive or not.

The only other item I can think of right now - did you add third-party DRAM (Crucial, Kingston, Corsair, etc) to the iMac? Occasionally, there can be issues with DRAM that might cause freezing like that, but I would not want to say more until you confirm that you added DRAM.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

As mentioned above, it could be a problem with the internal hard drive.

But you don't have to pay a lot of $$$ to get it fixed.

You could buy an external USB3 SSD, plug it in, and boot and run from that instead.
It's very easy to do. Even a 500gb SSD will do the job (or just 250gb).

Once you're running from that, you can then "work on" the hard drive with software tools.

I'd get whatever I wanted to keep off of it first -- copy to SSD or another drive.
Then, I'd try to erase it using Disk Utility.
Then, I'd run DU's "repair disk" function on it, and see what kind of a report you get.

If the internal drive tested ok, I'd use it for things like movies, music, and pics (but keep it backed up).
If it wouldn't test ok, I'd just "leave it there", and use external drives instead.