Mac has slowed down exponentially in the last week

[MillerMadHouse]

hello my mac leopard has been slowing down slowly for the past few weeks now and just yesterday its slowness jumped from being manageable and being tolerated to complete and utter slowness the internet on both safari and firefox took at least 5 mins to load any page, while attempting to print it took nearly 5 mins to even get the pop up asking if you want to print absolutely everything was horribly slow today it has sped up to the manageable but still slow level, i have changed and tightened my fire wall and security preferences. i have also been watching activity monitor closely and found nothing suspicious ive looked at my computer logs and they also show the regular. has anyone had this problem and or know how to fix it/ get rid of anything in my computor.

 

[Spike88]

As a first step, manually set the MTU within your new Mac. MTU is set to "automatic" but sometimes it has difficulties setting itself. If wondering, I had to manually set MTU within my new iMac - in order to make its internal connection faster.

After MTU is set and your iMac is restarted, do execute a speed test. Many ISPs provide their own speed test utility. If your ISP doesn't have one, use http://www.speedtest.net/ instead.

Good luck!!!!

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For MTU information, surf:

http://help.expedient.com/broadband/mtu.shtml
http://www.zen.co.uk/Support/Tools.aspx

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To manually set MTU value within my mid-2010 iMac 21.5" (that can also be used for a MBP), I used a free MTU size Discovery / Set utility. With this tool (saved in my iMac's Applications - Utility folder), I manually set its MTU on all ports (ethernet, wireless, firewire, etc.) only once. Set it once and its done.

This script can be found at:

http://tumbleseed.wordpress.com/products/set-mtu/

Note: Click on its "Download the Set MTU 0.2 script application (zip)" text - to obtain the MTU script file.

If wondering, I changed my iMac's MTU size to 1492 (same as my ADSL Modem / Wireless "2Wire 1701 box" MTU "fixed value" size) and it works great. Much, much faster then allowing background "automatic" MTU setting task.

Good luck!

.

 

[rkaufmann87]

hello my mac leopard has been slowing down slowly for the past few weeks now and just yesterday its slowness jumped from being manageable and being tolerated to complete and utter slowness the internet on both safari and firefox took at least 5 mins to load any page, while attempting to print it took nearly 5 mins to even get the pop up asking if you want to print absolutely everything was horribly slow today it has sped up to the manageable but still slow level, i have changed and tightened my fire wall and security preferences. i have also been watching activity monitor closely and found nothing suspicious ive looked at my computer logs and they also show the regular. has anyone had this problem and or know how to fix it/ get rid of anything in my computor.

This sounds like a HD that is either failing or is too full. OS X should have a reserve of 10-15% of the total disk space available. If your disk has less than that then you need to move or delete some data off of it. The easiest way to check disk space is: Disk Utility-Highlight the internal HD on the left- then it will indicate the capacity and how much space is available.

If you have more than 15% available then I'd recommend Apple Hardware Test, the instructions are located on this Apple Advice letter.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509

Report back what you find.

Roger

 

[OldCorpse]

OP - you really should specify what you have. Just saying "my imac leopard" doesn't give us much. What model of iMac, and running which iteration of leopard? FWIW, my iMac has also slowed down drastically - I have a 2009 2.8 i7, running 10.6.4. And my HDD is only about 140GB full with 850GB free. I even started a thread about that here.