My late-2006 20" 2.16 fast as a late-2009 21.5" 3.06 iMac?

[bear1973]

It seems that the xBench results for the new 21.5 iMac (base model) are about the same - and maybe a tad bit lower - than my late 2006 20" 2.16 Ghz iMac (score: 140.8) My Geekbench score is lower - c.2900 - it seems, but not by as much as I thought.

Can this be? Is my machine just as fast as the new base models? I've always found that my 2.16 was a bit pokey, sometimes take 15 secs to launch Entourage or Word and 5-10 secs to launch Safari. Opening documents takes a while as well. I was thinking of upgrading, but these speeds are not encouraging.

Any thoughts?

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

Nope, its that simple. I have a 2.4 Imac/2600 and we have a 3.06/4670 and the new machine is faster at everything. Games are all being played at 1600 resolution even Bioshock. Its boot up is very very fast plus those xbench scores are kind of getting obsolete. Lets face it the machines get filled with junk as that happens everything slows down as the hard drive is off hunting for info.

 

[bear1973]

Slowing down....

....yeah, I've thought that might be the case. How does one "clean up"
an older iMac? I've considered starting fresh with a new formatting of the hard drive and erasing all non-essential files, maybe sticking them on an external drive.

On the other hand, comparable 2.16 iMacs like mine are selling for $550-$650 locally on Craigslist. That means an upgrade would be around $450-$550.

 

[Poncho]

Best and quickest thing is to buy an external hard drive (it will have to be a firewire one if PPC) and partiton it using disk utility into two parts, making sure one partition is only, say 10GB bigger than the number of GBs used on your Mac. Then use super duper to clone your mac to the external hard drive. Because the partition is smaller than the hard drive in your Mac Super Duper will not be able to make a block by block copy so will copy stuff starting at the top of your directory, neatly, file by file. When this is finished, boot from the external hard drive (one way is to do this under system preferences/start up disc) wipe your Mac and then copt y it all back. This will give you a nice defragmented copy of your stuff.

then, have a look in start up items. Perhaps there are things in there that are starting up when you switch on that you don't want and which are slowing up your mac by running in the background all the time.

Then, with Word, go to Preferences and find the box that is clicked to show wysiwyg Fonts. Uncheck this and Word loads a ton faster (well it does with Office 2008.)

Also, if you want to give the feel of running faster, choose scale effect for minimising windows (every little helps!)