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Sluggish iMac 2.16 GHz with Snow Leopard

S

snverhallen

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 17, 2007
566
0
Hi there,

I have an iMac (2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM) and it just is a bit sluggish, not a lot but it's enough to make you sigh and think "I have got to fix this".

So basically I get the beachball every so often and login to users is slow, launching apps on the Dock sometimes freezes up for half a second and things like my typing freezing when typing into Spotlight occur as well.

I have tried repairing permissions, running maintenance scripts, rebuilding prebindings, optimizing files and RAM using Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner. But it still is just not snappy like I want it.

Please, any help would be appreciated.

snverhallen
 
Did you do clean install or just upgrade? Also, you have only 1GB RAM so that's why you get beachballed. Get 4GB RAM and do a clean install
 
I agree. But I would try upping the RAM to 2 or 4 before doing a clean install unless you don't mind that process.
 
I did a upgrade, and like I said things are going OK, but it's just irritating when things like the Dock stutter, and things like login are slow and little things like like fading into the login screen (mine just pops up) and blocky user switching.

BTW, I can only upgrade to 3 gigs of RAM, it's funny though when I go to Crucial it says it can find a way to max out my RAM, yet when I scroll down I can just buy a 2 GB stick and a 1 GB stick which obviously would max it out.

And would upgrading my RAM from 1 gig to 3 gigs really improve the things I'm talking about?

Thanks again,

snverhallen

EDIT: Some of my RAM stats from Activity Monitor: with only Safari running I only have 235 MB's free, with some other apps (5) open, I only have 45 MB's free. Is this good or bad? Do I need RAM or not?
 
snverhallen said:
And would upgrading my RAM from 1 gig to 3 gigs really improve the things I'm talking about?
Click to expand...

Yes

EDIT: Some of my RAM stats from Activity Monitor: with only Safari running I only have 235 MB's free, with some other apps (5) open, I only have 45 MB's free. Is this good or bad? Do I need RAM or not?
Click to expand...

That's very bad. Almost all of your 1GB is in use which means when you try to do something, it lags because RAM is full and data has to be transferred to much slower HD. Definitely get more RAM, it'll help you A LOT.
 
Hellhammer said:
Yes



That's very bad. Almost all of your 1GB is in use which means when you try to do something, it lags because RAM is full and data has to be transferred to much slower HD. Definitely get more RAM, it'll help you A LOT.
Click to expand...

OK, well I am now buying RAM from Crucial (2 GB stick and 1 GB stick).

Crucial is good right?
 
zedsdead said:
Yes them or

www.macsales.com
Click to expand...

OK, and I heard that you should normally pair up RAM but on the Crucial website it said it was fine to put 2 GB's and 1 GB, and the max my iMac can handle is 3 anyway so it's a waste of money to get 2 x 2.

I mean the performance difference between 2GB x 2GB and 2 GB x 1 GB is so small anyway right?
 
No, I tried to tell a friend with this same iMac that he needed "matched pairs" of two gigs of ram and you will get 3.3gbs of ram plus it increases speed in another way that I forgot how to explain.

In my mom's old iMac G5, I put a matched pair of two one gig sticks and it was much faster than with two NON matched pairs.

You also should think about upgrading your hard drive to a 32mb cache'd drive. Cheap hard drive upgrade plus ram will make it much more smooth.
 
California said:
No, I tried to tell a friend with this same iMac that he needed "matched pairs" of two gigs of ram and you will get 3.3gbs of ram plus it increases speed in another way that I forgot how to explain.

In my mom's old iMac G5, I put a matched pair of two one gig sticks and it was much faster than with two NON matched pairs.

You also should think about upgrading your hard drive to a 32mb cache'd drive. Cheap hard drive upgrade plus ram will make it much more smooth.
Click to expand...

So a 2 x 2 config. really makes a big difference compared to a 2 x 1 config? Could someone else back this up?
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A400 Safari/528.16)

I'm having similar problems. But I bought my mac only 6 months ago. It has 4g of RAM and doesn't run well at all. I did an erase and install with snow leopard to see if it would improve but it's still the same. Beachball when waking from sleep, dock freezes, iTunes freezes etc. What else could it be?? Hard disk maybe?
I really don't know. Thinking of taking into apple but not sure if they would think it's series enough problems to look at it.
 
redgaz26 said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A400 Safari/528.16)

I'm having similar problems. But I bought my mac only 6 months ago. It has 4g of RAM and doesn't run well at all. I did an erase and install with snow leopard to see if it would improve but it's still the same. Beachball when waking from sleep, dock freezes, iTunes freezes etc. What else could it be?? Hard disk maybe?
I really don't know. Thinking of taking into apple but not sure if they would think it's series enough problems to look at it.
Click to expand...

Have you tried doing all the normal maintenance stuff? like weekly, daily and monthly scripts? also repairing permissions, other mismash of stuff like deleting the user cache, if you get an app like maintenance, onyx, or mainmenu that should do all the stuff i mentioned :)

PTP
 
tried them all no change. I think something was not quite right with it from day one but it's hard to explain, I had my older intel mac for 3 years with no problems at all:rolleyes:
 
I would check if its still under warranty and take it in, may be a graphics problem.

You've done a clean install which is what I would recommend to the other guy.

Also he should of course up grade the ram to 3! gigs of ram, its so cheap! No point wasting your money on matching pairs, doesn't matter with this model.
 
In my experience, old intel macs are problematic, my sister's black macbook 2ghz core duo is slow, it freezes and its just not a good computer, granted it has 512mb RAM, but it runs tiger and its not good.
 
Just an update:

I have instead opted to go for a 2 x 2 config (so 2 sticks of 2 GB) as I read that Dual Channel does help, and the extra 1 GB can be used for other parts of the OS so it's a win-win in that regard.

Will update later, letting you know if the RAM did actually help.
 
otis123 said:
In my experience, old intel macs are problematic, my sister's black macbook 2ghz core duo is slow, it freezes and its just not a good computer, granted it has 512mb RAM, but it runs tiger and its not good.
Click to expand...

The 512MB of RAM is probably mostly to blame. I can't talk about the Core Duos but the 2.16 C2Ds are real champs. My iMac has never felt slow in the 2.5 years I've had it and I regularly edit video and photos.

To the OP. Upping the RAm if definitely the way to go. If that doesn't work then consider doing a clean install of SL and cleaning out all your unwanted files and apps.
 
same problem... and now a solution?

I have the same problem - I have an 20" Intel iMac w/ 4GB RAM, less than a year old, which within the last six months developed the issue where it will do the spinning beachball for something like 5-10 seconds when doing even innocuous things like launching apps or saving a file. My wife insists that it was since I installed Snow Leopard, but I'm 95% sure it was doing this prior to Snow Leopard (I had hoped Snow Leopard would fix the problem).

But now Performance Update 1.0 has been released, which purports to fix a problem that sounds a lot like ours:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3901

Can't wait to try it when I get home!

Does anyone here have an iMac with the same issue, who has installed the Performance Update? God, I'm hoping for some good news...
 
Not sure if this will help but when my net going sluggish, its either because I've run out of my internet usage capacity for the month and my internet service provider has slowed down my net.

The second reason is when its the peak internet usage hours in Europe and or the USA. I live in NZ so its only sluggish when I visit non NZ sites, which is pretty much all the time lol:D
 
mrsir2009 said:
Not sure if this will help but when my net going sluggish, its either because I've run out of my internet usage capacity for the month and my internet service provider has slowed down my net.
Click to expand...

My problem (and I suspect, the problem experienced by most people on this thread) has nothing to do with Internet access. I could be doing something like playing a video on my hard drive or working on a Microsoft Word document when the spinning beach ball hits. If other posts are to be believed, this is possibly an issue with the newest firmware interacting poorly with the hard drive. I will post with my experience updating later tonight.
 
rjackman said:
I have a 2008 Imac with the issue and it won't let me install the new update on mine :(
Click to expand...

Damn, me, too. I downloaded the update, but when I ran it, it said something along the lines of it wasn't valid for my machine. Looks like I'm going to have to try replacing the hard drive... What a pain!
 
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