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Sloooow iMac!

H

HappySnail

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 26, 2008
131
0
I purchased a Aluminum 24inch iMac in December and so far it has treated my pretty well. Unfortunately recently it is slowing down an awful lot. These stacks which rose instantly now hesitate for a second then jerkily fan open. the top menu bar which appeared almost instantaneously at first now takes a good 4 seconds to appear and applications can take up to twice as long to load.

1. Anyone else got the same problem?
2. Is it a virus?
3. If i backed up the software and completely wiped the computer would i need the CDs for the software again?
4. What the hell should i do, is this normal?
5. Onyx told me the drive needed to be repaired using the original disc i did this and Onyx still said it needed repairing, what?

Sorry about all the questions but i am so confused at why this is happening, it has turned my lovely leopard into a uselessly clunky machine.
 
HappySnail said:
1. Anyone else got the same problem?
2. Is it a virus?
3. If i backed up the software and completely wiped the computer would i need the CDs for the software again?
4. What the hell should i do, is this normal?
5. Onyx told me the drive needed to be repaired using the original disc i did this and Onyx still said it needed repairing, what?
Click to expand...

First, it is VERY unlikely that you have a virus.

Take a look at Activity Monitor (its in your Applications/Utilities folder) to see what, if any app or utility is showing a ton of CPU usage. Somebody recently had a printer service that was consuming most of his CPU time.

Beyond that what model iMac do you have? How much memory do you have? Have you changed anything recently that coincides with the speed issue?

As far as backup goes, if the problem is software and you back it up, then do a full restore from the backup you will be reinstalling the problem.
 
HappySnail said:
I purchased a Aluminum 24inch iMac in December and so far it has treated my pretty well. Unfortunately recently it is slowing down an awful lot. These stacks which rose instantly now hesitate for a second then jerkily fan open. the top menu bar which appeared almost instantaneously at first now takes a good 4 seconds to appear and applications can take up to twice as long to load.

1. Anyone else got the same problem?
2. Is it a virus?
3. If i backed up the software and completely wiped the computer would i need the CDs for the software again?
4. What the hell should i do, is this normal?
5. Onyx told me the drive needed to be repaired using the original disc i did this and Onyx still said it needed repairing, what?

Sorry about all the questions but i am so confused at why this is happening, it has turned my lovely leopard into a uselessly clunky machine.
Click to expand...

its prob a virus, even tho macs have very few viruses, they still have them
 
I know my iMac gets slow when I run one of the CS software. I always look to see if I have photoshop or illustrator open... they slow my machine down big time!!! Other programs being open don't really affect my speed much just the adobes... they are massive! HAHA
 
It's a 07 silver with 2.8Ghz and 2GB ram. I don't have Photoshop or any other CS application open and the Cpu usage hardly gets over 10%, i still don't understand it. Does anyone recommend cleaning it in some way either with software or by backup and reinstall or is that too dramatic.
 
As someone mentioned earlier, you can look at what you're running in the Activity Monitor. Secondly, try repairing the permissions from Disk Utility or OnyX. Let us know how it goes.
 
HappySnail said:
It's a 07 silver with 2.8Ghz and 2GB ram. I don't have Photoshop or any other CS application open and the Cpu usage hardly gets over 10%, i still don't understand it. Does anyone recommend cleaning it in some way either with software or by backup and reinstall or is that too dramatic.
Click to expand...

Boot from the system installation DVD and see if the menu behaves normally.
 
I'm surprised that nobody noted this possible solution...

.Reboot
.Load the disk utility
.Repair permissions
.Reboot

See if that helps.
 
Muncher said:
What else would it do? (Not trying to be offensive, just curious).
Click to expand...

The OP said one of his symptoms was that his menu's took 4 seconds to appear. My suggestion was to boot off the OS X DVD. By booting off the DVD he gets the equivalent of a fresh OS to test for the slow menu's, without having to monkey up his current OS install.

If the problem was the OS X installation on his HDD, booting off the DVD should provide normal menu response. Otherwise he has a hardware issue. While he is at it he could also do a permissions repair from the DVD.
 
Riiight...

iSpoody 1243 said:
its prob a virus, even tho macs have very few viruses, they still have them
Click to expand...

Stop this drivel. Seriously. Give me the name of a virus that infected a 10.5 or 10.4 machine (in the wild, not as a proof of concept).

ONE.
 
You may have a look at the Login items.
System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items.
See if there's something which isn't supposed to be there.

Maybe cleaning the user and system cache with an utility like MainMenu will work.

Disconnect everything from your iMac except your keyboard and mouse and see if this gives an improvement.
(What mouse are you using btw? I heard of problems with Microsoft mice...)

Finally it could be slow or corrupt? indexing by Spotlight.
With an utility like MainMenu you can rebuild the Spotlight index.
 
Frozonecold said:
The current Leopard release has absolutely no viruses.

@OP: How much of your HDD is used. Once your HDD starts to become full, things start to slow down.
Click to expand...

really you positive about that buddy....cause i'm pretty sure your wrong, just because apple says there aren't any and you haven't gotten one yet doesn't mean there are absolutly no viruses for leopard what so ever....even though it's incredibly unlikley and would be very very hard to get i would bet there is definatly a virus out there.
 
Thank you to everyone for the replies, I have tried reloading it from the disc apart from the fact the disc took 10 minutes to load (Anyone know why this would be.) Then i repaired the startup drive which now Onyx thinks is fixed too.
It has speeded up slightly but is still no where near as fast as it was. Does anyone know how full the HDD has to be for the computer to slow down i have 70Gb free from the 500Gb HDD and i figured this would be ok. The suggestion from Gehrbox was right and the menus are much faster off the disc but this does not help me speed up the actual OS.
Do you think i need to completely re install the OS.
 
HappySnail said:
Thank you to everyone for the replies, I have tried reloading it from the disc apart from the fact the disc took 10 minutes to load (Anyone know why this would be.) Then i repaired the startup drive which now Onyx thinks is fixed too.
It has speeded up slightly but is still no where near as fast as it was. Does anyone know how full the HDD has to be for the computer to slow down i have 70Gb free from the 500Gb HDD and i figured this would be ok. The suggestion from Gehrbox was right and the menus are much faster off the disc but this does not help me speed up the actual OS.
Do you think i need to completely re install the OS.
Click to expand...

Glad the DVD boot narrowed the problem a bit for you. You have something running on your HDD that is causing your system to slow. If all your external devices are disconnected and still have a speed issue your choices are find what is running thats bogging things down or reinstall OS X.

The first thing to do is to create another user account and login with it. If it runs normally then it is something unique to your old account such as a login startup item. If it's slow with any account that is logged in, its system wide. You can try running the Console app and seeing if it shows anything in the system logs. If you are unable to identify it you will have to reload the OS.
 
I spent about half an hour no Onyx cleaning up and sorting out everything i could then deleted some strange login items i never new i had and i deleted a few things off my hard drive all of these things speeded up my computer to almost as fast as it was to start with. Thank you everyone for your help i was really getting worried about this.
 
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