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What can i do to speed up or upgrade this middle aged iMac of mine

T

tac22

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 16, 2009
409
0
So i got my First mac August 07, it was the new alum imac. But the low end 20inch 2.0ghz 1GB Ram. Running tiger at the time, never upgraded to Leopard but it I got our New Cat Snow Leopard on it back in August.:cool:

It actualy slowed down alot after... more reliable, less crashing, but really slowww.... soo i took the plunge and upraded it all the way to 4gb and made a huge difference. But i still feel like its not as fast as it use to be when i first got it. Especial when working with iMovie and editing things, dowloading things...

Any helpful hints on what i can do to speed it up. I'll deffinetly get another year and a half out of it. a total of 4 years, but i'm just curiouse if there is any way i can optamize my experience with it. ;)
 
Of course it isn't as fast as when you bought it. It has newer software. Your hard drive is more full.
 
So basically the only other thing i can do is upgrade my hard drive. Its 250 Gb and i probably have only 60GB free right now. I was thinking about getting an external drive. But would getting a new internal hard drive speed up my computer, would i want it bigger or faster or both???
 
tac22 said:
So basically the only other thing i can do is upgrade my hard drive. Its 250 Gb and i probably have only 60GB free right now. I was thinking about getting an external drive. But would getting a new internal hard drive speed up my computer, would i want it bigger or faster or both???
Click to expand...
faster inside, bigger outside :D
 
>So basically the only other thing i can do is upgrade my hard drive

Look into switching to SSD which of course depends on your budget as these things aren't cheap but would make for a significant boost in performance.

Or.... You could just buy a new imac... :D

However, I believe your wrong with what you're saying. There is no way that the same imac would feel slower with 4GB than it did when it had 1GB. That is if you compare Apples with Apples. Computers tend to become slow over time as you add more rubbish and resource eating stuff you probably never really use. Did you do a fresh install when you installed SL? Sure, Snow Leopard would demand more from you imac but now that you have 4GB, it should be nice and smooth. I mean downloading things has nothing to do with your imac but more with your network set up and ISP unless of course you screwed up your network settings.

Switch to SSD, add an external FW800 disk and you'll be set for another 2 years easy.
 
Okay isn't my internal hard drive the fastest they get my specs (250GB Serial ATA1; 7200 rpm) Or do they go faster. I know about SSD, and they are amazingly faster, though much more expensive. If i wanted to, would my iMac be compatible with an SSD, and would you recommend it.

Definitely getting an external drive to increase space though
 
tac22 said:
Okay isn't my internal hard drive the fastest they get my specs (250GB Serial ATA1; 7200 rpm) Or do they go faster. I know about SSD, and they are amazingly faster, though much more expensive. If i wanted to, would my iMac be compatible with an SSD, and would you recommend it.

Definitely getting an external drive to increase space though
Click to expand...

Not sure about SSD being compatible in your Mac, but if purchasing one i'd get a smaller drive to keep the price down and just put your OS and applications on it and use the external for most media files.
 
tac22 said:
So basically the only other thing i can do is upgrade my hard drive. Its 250 Gb and i probably have only 60GB free right now. I was thinking about getting an external drive. But would getting a new internal hard drive speed up my computer, would i want it bigger or faster or both???
Click to expand...

No, I posted a link to where you should upgrade your RAM.
 
Yea i said i upgraded to 4gb of ram already, unless you can have more, which i pretty sure you can't, and otherwise 4gb is sufficient, i rarely have over 3gb being used.

So it seams like a SSD drive is the only other option? and i'm still trying to figure out how possible it would be to swap my hard drive with one.
 
tac22 said:
Yea i said i upgraded to 4gb of ram already, unless you can have more, which i pretty sure you can't, and otherwise 4gb is sufficient, i rarely have over 3gb being used.

So it seams like a SSD drive is the only other option? and i'm still trying to figure out how possible it would be to swap my hard drive with one.
Click to expand...
Your iMac can take 6GB using 1 4GB stick but it won't go any faster if you are not even using 3GB. Look to ifixit.com or youtube for guides on how to replace the drive. An SSD internal would be your best bet followed by a good sized (1TB) 7200RPM internal. An emptier drive is faster than a fuller one. If you go for the SSD route, get a big external FW800 drive if you need more space.
 
Thats still a nice machine I would definitely get a cheap ssd in their and feel the speed! No point spending too much money as you are limited by the 1.5 gigabits per second on the sata connector. You will need a 3.5-2.5 connector.
 
darrellishere said:
Thats still a nice machine I would definitely get a cheap ssd in their and feel the speed! No point spending too much money as you are limited by the 1.5 gigabits per second on the sata connector. You will need a 3.5-2.5 connector.
Click to expand...

Well, i was searching around and i think i found the best ssd for a mac, if i want to make this invesment i sure don't want buy one that degrades over time. Anybody else heard about the Mercury Extreme Enterprise Class SSD SATA 3.0GB/s Solid-State Drive

Comes in 50Gb 100GB 200GB, priced at 230, 400, and too much for me to think about...

I'd sure be willing to pay 230, but do you think 50GB is large enough... it seams so small to me... even if i have an external drive for most media.
i'd be fine with the 100GB, but its really out of my price range right now...

So is 50GB enough, and how quickly will it take for the price to drop, and should i wait
 
Id skip the SSD myself.

IMHO -- the best bang for the buck would be a 1TB Seagate 7200.12 drive.

About $100 and one of the fastest price/size drives you can buy.
 
Well, i might not put the ssd in, but if i'm not, i'm also not going to crack my imac open just to put a larger hd in, so i'll just get a big external hard drive for my media, to free up some space, and keep on thinking about the ssd.
 
tac22 said:
Well, i might not put the ssd in, but if i'm not, i'm also not going to crack my imac open just to put a larger hd in, so i'll just get a big external hard drive for my media, to free up some space, and keep on thinking about the ssd.
Click to expand...

opposed to what most mac owners may say.. a nice defrag speeds up things for me A LOT.. i can always see this on boot-ups.. when my imac starts taking over 40 seconds to boot up i run idefrag and after that it comes back to the original 33 second boot-up..

you do have to run this program from a secondary harddrive which is indeed a big pain but it's definitely worth it to me..

i installed leopard on a partition of my time machine back up disk then i boot up on that partition and run i defrag.. it completely ejects my main hdd and it takes about 3 hours to do a full defrag..

idefrag does cost money but i found it for free at the place where captain morgan likes to visit :D.. you can at least try it.. it works for me good luck
 
tac22 said:
So i got my First mac August 07, it was the new alum imac. But the low end 20inch 2.0ghz 1GB Ram. Running tiger at the time, never upgraded to Leopard but it I got our New Cat Snow Leopard on it back in August.:cool:

It actualy slowed down alot after... more reliable, less crashing, but really slowww.... soo i took the plunge and upraded it all the way to 4gb and made a huge difference. But i still feel like its not as fast as it use to be when i first got it. Especial when working with iMovie and editing things, dowloading things...

Any helpful hints on what i can do to speed it up. I'll deffinetly get another year and a half out of it. a total of 4 years, but i'm just curiouse if there is any way i can optamize my experience with it. ;)
Click to expand...

go back to tiger or leopard.?

slow leopard is a dog
 
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