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Mac Slow Down over time

turtlez

turtlez

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 17, 2012
977
0
Do macs slow down over time or am I just hallucinating.

For months now my mac starts going crazy with the hard drive buzzing away even just loading web pages. IIRC back in 2008 when I bought this Mac Pro it would be able to open loads of apps at once really fast now it just struggles opening Mail App. I have to force quit photoshop to actually close photoshop or it just hangs for minutes clicking away thinking whatever it thinks. I have never experienced SSD but it seems like my 7200rpm hard drive just turned into a 5RPM hard drive in the last two months :\

thoughts?
 
Have you done a clean install since buying the mac? If you don't do this every few years it will slow down because of junk thats accumulated. If you can I would buy an ssd and use that hard drive as a data drive.
 
It might be your boot hard drive is faulty. My wife had the exact same symptoms with her iMac. I replaced her boot drive with a new one and her imac has been running smoothly since. Run diagnostics on your hd -- it might be getting ready to fail.
 
alright thanks for the input guys, I appreciate it. The computer is driving me nuts which is not cool since it is half used for work stuff lately.

I am downloading Onyx and going to see if that does anything. If not I will try format and clean install. I clean installed it for Mountain Lion on release so it shouldn't be that.
 
BigJohno said:
Have you done a clean install since buying the mac? If you don't do this every few years it will slow down because of junk thats accumulated. If you can I would buy an ssd and use that hard drive as a data drive.
Click to expand...

Junk ? On a Mac ???
Very strange ....
 
BigJohno said:
Seriously. You think macs are impervious to getting build up of files?

Judging that he did a fresh install not to long ago leads me to believe its hardware related.... How much ram do you have?
Click to expand...

Every os builds up files, but only in windows this affect the performance of the system in a noticeable way.
 
Max(IT) said:
Every os builds up files, but only in windows this affect the performance of the system in a noticeable way.
Click to expand...

Wow, talk about complete misinformation and ignorance.

Windows is faster than OSX, and files can clog up any system, OS X included.
 
turtlez said:
Do macs slow down over time or am I just hallucinating.

For months now my mac starts going crazy with the hard drive buzzing away even just loading web pages. IIRC back in 2008 when I bought this Mac Pro it would be able to open loads of apps at once really fast now it just struggles opening Mail App. I have to force quit photoshop to actually close photoshop or it just hangs for minutes clicking away thinking whatever it thinks. I have never experienced SSD but it seems like my 7200rpm hard drive just turned into a 5RPM hard drive in the last two months :\

thoughts?
Click to expand...

Do you get the beachball a lot?

I suggest downloading SMART utility and it will tell you if you have any bad sectors. I had bad sectors on my WD caviar black within a few weeks of purchase and I noticed the OS would hang every so often and that my time machine would fail to back up. HD would sometimes go nuts too but would make a ticking sound when it could not read correctly.
 
In my experience hard drives do become slower over time. Not sure exactly why but it doesn't really matter the reason. There are all sorts of articles online which give you things to try but I am not convinced.

If you are looking for a 'New Mac' feel without the 'New Mac' price then I would definitely recommend upgrading to an SSD. I also have a 2008 Mac Pro and upgraded to an SSD about 6 months ago. The difference is massive and I would never go back. I don't have Photoshop but Mail.app opens in less than a second and Word opens in just over one. If you can afford it get yourself an SSD (even a small one) and do a clean install on it. Leave your old drive in the machine if you require additional data storage. I don't think you will regret it.

Andrew
 
TennisandMusic said:
Wow, talk about complete misinformation and ignorance.

Windows is faster than OSX, and files can clog up any system, OS X included.
Click to expand...

Keep your "ignorance" for yourself ...

"Windows is faster than OSX" is a sentence that, alone, shows us who is the ignorant here.
How do you define an os faster than another ? What "windows and OSX" are you speaking about ?
And so on ....
 
I think he means Windows 7 and or Windows 8 as opposed to Mountain Lion.. I for one have noticed that Lion and ML both take longer to boot up compared to Snow Leopard. My Gateway Core2Extreme 3 GHZ laptop with Windows 8 Pro boots up incredibly fast, while my Mac Pro takes a bit to boot up ML and or Lion.

Snow Leopard boots up even faster than Lion and ML put together, and I have a striped RAID.


Max(IT) said:
Keep your "ignorance" for yourself ...

"Windows is faster than OSX" is a sentence that, alone, shows us who is the ignorant here.
How do you define an os faster than another ? What "windows and OSX" are you speaking about ?
And so on ....
Click to expand...
 
Ok, so you are speaking about boot time, that have little to do with a "faster OS" ...

I honestly don't know about Windows 8 (it should be Window 8), but there's nothing "faster" in windows 7.
 
turtlez said:
alright thanks for the input guys, I appreciate it. The computer is driving me nuts which is not cool since it is half used for work stuff lately.

I am downloading Onyx and going to see if that does anything. If not I will try format and clean install. I clean installed it for Mountain Lion on release so it shouldn't be that.
Click to expand...

Onyx is mostly a matter of convenience these days. When it first appeared, it was extremely useful. It could just be a dying hard drive. Is the hard drive really full? Drives do lose performance when they're exceptionally full, although you can probably squeeze and ssd further in that regard. If you have disk warrior, run that after the clean install.


TennisandMusic said:
Windows is faster than OSX, and files can clog up any system, OS X included.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't go that far. The file system in OSX can get a bit weird at times. Disk Warrior helps, but I kind of wonder how much longer they'll be around. They still require the use of a dvd or external drive to boot, and it's really annoying to update.
 
I have 4GB of RAM, I don't really want to buy more since it is ridiculously expensive for the 2008 mac pro, could almost spend as much on RAM as I could getting a whole new computer haha. Hard drive is only 20% Capacity and the SMART passed the test
 
turtlez said:
I have 4GB of RAM, I don't really want to buy more since it is ridiculously expensive for the 2008 mac pro, could almost spend as much on RAM as I could getting a whole new computer haha. Hard drive is only 20% Capacity and the SMART passed the test
Click to expand...

Just to make sure: the SMART utility I am talking about is a separate program. My defective HD passed the test in Apples disk utility.

http://download.cnet.com/SMART-Utility/3000-2248_4-146625.html

Its a demo version I think so it can only be used a few times.
 
My 2008 started having similar strange behavior about 2 month before the video card displayed video artifact symptoms. I replaced the card and the machine seems to have new life.

This sure sounds like a hard drive problem, however.

Are there any other cards on the PCI bus? Any external drives?

BTW, I don't do clean installs and I've never experienced MAC slowdowns except for those explained by hardware issues.
 
I have a feeling it is due to only having 4GB of ram because it is fine until I open photoshop then I get a tonne of page outs and my hard drive never shuts up.
 
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