02-25-2010, 04:26 PM

My iMac is a few years old now but still going strong and came shipped with OSX Tiger. When Leopard came out I upgraded to that and it's performance was every bit as good. However when I upgraded to Snow Leopard I've noticed a definite drop in performance.

Most tasks just seem to take longer to perform, for example in Firefox closing a tab takes a second or two to actually take place rather than being instant as it used to be, even opening web pages seems to take a couple of seconds longer than 'normal'.

It's not just Firefox, certain programs also run slower. Aperture 2 which used to be a little slow under Leopard is now quite a bit slower under Snow Leopard. iTunes takes longer to launch and to respond and opening large files (600MB+ in Photoshop takes longer)

Initially after upgrading to Snow Leopard I found I was getting lots of random problems like iTunes not working correctly with my iPhone, fonts not displaying correctly and so I reinstalled Snow Leopard and all those problems went away but I'm still left with my system running slower than it did.

My iMac currently only has 2GB of RAM and only supports a maximum of 3GB and I've just this second ordered new RAM to max it out to 3GB but is there anything else I can do to get my performance back?

So far I've tried:
Resetting Params
Verifying Permissions on all drives

Is there anything else I can do?

02-26-2010, 06:59 AM

HD space left?
Maintenance.... try OnyX and use the automation tab.
Ram ....even if you are going to max out the ram, I recommend matching with 2x2 even if it can only utilize 3GB.
Overall, I'm a big fan of a clean install, and clean installation of all the 3rd party software, and then just restoring docs, music, pics, movies, etc in order to keep my macs running as good as the day I got them when it comes to upgrades.

02-26-2010, 08:01 AM

Yes 2 x 2BGB sticsk is the best even though your computer can only address 3GB in total. But my current imac too can only address 3GB just like yours. And preformance having the 4GB when compared to 3GB is minimal at best. I have tested both out, my friend had spare ram for me to try. And honestly I just went out and topped my mac up to 3GB. And it works just fine. So I would just get the 3GB cause it's cheaper and the 4th GB would be mostly wasted anyways for you.

Also I'd hit up onyx like the above poster said.
Also I'd look into Disk Inventory X
Disk Inventory X
It tells you in a nice format what is hogging up for HD space so you can clean it out very easily.