Learning to Service Mac

[tombombodil]

Ok so I have been working with PC's for years and have a vast repository of knowledge in regards to fixing upgrading and maintaining them, but have rarely worked with Macs. Just recently a friend of mine said his iMac was running so slow if was basically unusable. I said that I'd never really worked with macs but I'd take a look at it as the most basic problems are common to all OS's. I discovered and fixed a couple big problems, like an overfull hard drive and only 1GB of RAM in a 3 year old machine running modern applications.

However it's still running slower than before and while I know that the HFS filing system doesn't need regular defragmentation, I have heard from several credible and independent sources that some systems, like this one that have 200GB+ of photos and videos that have been haphazardly saved over the past 3 years, it could benefit from running a dedicated third party application.

So I downloaded Disc Warrior and had it just Analyze the main partition. the result was a solid block of Red. So does this mean that I should make a complete back up and then run it? Or does the program just not know how to interpret the filing system?

Please respond as I would like to get this back to my friend as soon as possible.

 

[louishen]

How much free space is there on that mac now and do you have a spare usb external drive to create a cloned drive back-up?

 

[tombombodil]

There is 50GB free of 200GB, and I have a 1TB external that has a full back up on it.

 

[dobby]

Did you try to run Onyx and Monolingual ?
If you are really not familiar with OS X us the default settings .
Both are free app .

 

[louishen]

A full back-up, did you use carbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to create a bootable full clone?

And what version of OSX is it running

 

[tombombodil]

It's running a fully updated version of Snow Leopard, and yes it is a full bootable backup.