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Mac Mini (2011) running very slow, even with 8GB RAM.

S

StewieGriffin76

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 14, 2012
4
0
Hey Everybody-

I have a Mac Mini 2011. A few months ago I upgraded the RAM to 8GB Corsair (2 x4GB). This thing is not running anything like I was hoping it would. Even with just a few webpage tabs and iTunes going, it is struggling. For example, when I click the iTunes icon in the dock so I can bring it up to play another song, the top taskbar disappears for a few seconds until iTunes appears. Then, when I click the forward arrow button on iTunes, there is about a five second delay before it "processes" the request and moves to the next song. Could I have bad memory sticks? I don't do anything real memory intensive (at least so I thought), but still try not to run more than a few programs at once because the machine might just totally freeze up (which has happened a few times). Thanks.
 
Look in the "About this Mac" and see how much memory it is showing up. It could be a faulty RAM stick or it could be they may not be inserted fully.
 
Take a look at Activity Monitor and see if anything is running and using up most CPU. Also, see if there is a lot of harddrive activity..
 
T'hain Esh Kelch said:
Take a look at Activity Monitor and see if anything is running and using up most CPU. Also, see if there is a lot of harddrive activity..
Click to expand...

+1 on the hard drive activity, back when I was sporting a HDD, if a program was writing or I was copying or transferring a file the system came to a crawl, also at 8GB of RAM.
 
StewieGriffin76 said:
Hey Everybody-

I have a Mac Mini 2011. A few months ago I upgraded the RAM to 8GB Corsair (2 x4GB). This thing is not running anything like I was hoping it would. Even with just a few webpage tabs and iTunes going, it is struggling. For example, when I click the iTunes icon in the dock so I can bring it up to play another song, the top taskbar disappears for a few seconds until iTunes appears. Then, when I click the forward arrow button on iTunes, there is about a five second delay before it "processes" the request and moves to the next song. Could I have bad memory sticks? I don't do anything real memory intensive (at least so I thought), but still try not to run more than a few programs at once because the machine might just totally freeze up (which has happened a few times). Thanks.
Click to expand...

do you have itunes on the internal hdd? if it is on the internal hdd is it huge? one more question about the hdd if it is the stock 500gb 5400 rpm it is a bit slow. if you are filled to 400 gb or 450gb it is slower. so is it the stock 500gb hdd and is it filled beyond 400gb.
 
philipma1957 said:
do you have itunes on the internal hdd? if it is on the internal hdd is it huge? one more question about the hdd if it is the stock 500gb 5400 rpm it is a bit slow. if you are filled to 400 gb or 450gb it is slower. so is it the stock 500gb hdd and is it filled beyond 400gb.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the responses. My HDD is stock and is only filled to abt 130 GB, with my iTunes library using about 98GB of it. Activity monitor shows iTunes using 1.4-1.5 GB, which seems really bizarre to me. I didn't think it was that much of a resource hog. Is it better to run iTunes from an external drive?
 
StewieGriffin76 said:
Thanks for the responses. My HDD is stock and is only filled to abt 130 GB, with my iTunes library using about 98GB of it. Activity monitor shows iTunes using 1.4-1.5 GB, which seems really bizarre to me. I didn't think it was that much of a resource hog. Is it better to run iTunes from an external drive?
Click to expand...

I have a 2012 MBA and my itunes library is open in full screen and only using 290mb RAM for your reference.
 
Hey men.

I got the same problem as you. My mac mini was very slow at the beginning and i dont know why. I ve bought 2 weeks ago MacBook Air which is almost the same as mac mini. Only different is that the MacBook Air is much faster than Mac mini. I ve got safari, iTunes, iPhoto open and it is still fast but on Mac mini when I was surfining on internet it was always very annoying. Sorry for my english.
PS: sell your mac mini and buy macbook.

Peace
 
StewieGriffin76 said:
Hey Everybody-

I have a Mac Mini 2011. A few months ago I upgraded the RAM to 8GB Corsair (2 x4GB). This thing is not running anything like I was hoping it would. Even with just a few webpage tabs and iTunes going, it is struggling. For example, when I click the iTunes icon in the dock so I can bring it up to play another song, the top taskbar disappears for a few seconds until iTunes appears. Then, when I click the forward arrow button on iTunes, there is about a five second delay before it "processes" the request and moves to the next song. Could I have bad memory sticks? I don't do anything real memory intensive (at least so I thought), but still try not to run more than a few programs at once because the machine might just totally freeze up (which has happened a few times). Thanks.
Click to expand...

This is definitely not normal behavior. I would two things.

• Replace the memory with the original Apple memory for testing. See if the issue goes away.
• If you have an external drive - USB or Firewire... do a clean OS install and boot from it to see if the issue goes away.

This eliminates the drive and memory as possible issues.
 
It looks like faulty RAM or failing hard drive. Thoroughly test both to rule them out. Mini shouldnt choke on simple usage such as this. I did 1080P video editing with many programs open and it was fast.
 
have you checked the console messages?

my 2010 mini was getting really slow and causing issues and it turned out to be the hard drive. I figure it was mainly from taking power hits and rebooting the machine since I never turn it off nor do I have an UPS.
 
before writing the ram off. Switch the chips around. Sometimes ram is fickle. It may not be recognized correctly in 1 slot but fine in another.
 
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