24" alum iMac 4gb ram slowing?

I bought a 24" alum iMac about 6 months ago, i ran it with stock 1gb for 3 day until my 4gb kit came in. I upgraded the ram, installed adobe design cs3 and toast and transmission, ohh and quark, and was really happy with the speed and pep of this workhorse. I could run indesign, photoshop, and safari with video chatting no problem, i bought a 160gb external hdd for time machine, and hooked it all up about 2 months later I start seeing alot more of the spinning beach ball and more lag, dont get me wrong the machine is still way faster than a "good" pc. but I never save anything to my mac, I put all my pdf's on my flash drive because I transfer them either to my pc or my work computer, I do have 850 mps in iTunes but other than that its pretty bare. I didnt start noticing the speed dropping until apple hit me with all those updates in i think late feb, early march. my question I guess is.... is there anyway to speed it back up? like a disk defrag, or a disk cleanup like on a pc? when my non-beleiver friend came to check out my shiny new mac they were very impressed when I oped photoshop in 4-5 seconds now it just doesnt do that. what could it be? There is a local computer shop that has a tech that is a mac fanatic. I know him pretty well, but I don't get to see him much, and he does something with new macs called a "super-tune"? says its a series of little tweaks he has learned from the web and trial and error, and that it'll improve the mac's speed and overall performance by 12-15% I don't know if its true of if its possible, but he charges 50$ to do it, and says everyones mac hes done it to, has really improved, and hes had no complaints, again he does this with an out-of-the-box unit so who knows, I will beg him for more info.

I personally don't feel its worth the money, you could always DIY if you want to. Perhaps you could try out Onyx or Mainmenu to try to speed up your Mac by clearing away unnecessary stuff. A computer will always slow down after time, no matter what, that's just how things are.

As much as i Love my iMac, mine has been doing the same thing (similar specs). My 5 year old XP machine can sometimes be quicker at certain things.
It's frustrating, because the only thing I can narrow it down to is installing Leopard.
It's even more of a shame that Leopard has a couple of key features I really could not do without.

Hi All, there is LOTS you can do. Here is my oft posted recipe for speeding up a slowing Mac:

First, check that your processor is running full speed. In Tiger at least, go to Preferences, Energy Saver, Options and look at the drop box down near the bottom called Processor Performance. If it is not set to "Highest", set it to that right away. This maximizes performance, but for notebooks, it may run down the battery faster. Note that not all Macs have this setting - my certainly my PowerMac G5 tower does, but not all Macs do. For Leopard, the preference panel is a bit different in this regard, but poke around and make sure that you are set up for optimum performance, not optimum battery life.

Next, for Intel Macs, fire up Activity Monitor and check for any processes running that are PPC not Intel (this is shown in one of the rightmost columns of the Processes display). If you are routinely running a background process of perhaps even a widget that is PPC, that process is running under Rosetta and that is consuming more CPU. You might wish to upgrade it to a Universal Binary, or replace it with something else.

Next, download OnyX and run the complete set of clean up and maintenance scripts and then evaluate again. Get OnyX at:

http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

Next, you may wish to check that you have enough free space on your hard drive. Highlight the Macintosh HD icon on your desktop, CTL-click it and select Get Info from the resulting menu. Make sure you have a reasonable amount of space left. If not, a little spring cleaning may be in order.

There are two excellent apps for showing where all of your hard disk space has gone, Disk Inventory X and WhatSize. Get them at:

Disk Inventory X: http://www.derlien.com

WhatSize: http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize

Both do a great job at letting you zero in on your largest disk space consumers, so that you can hunt down any rogue files (and both are freeware, which is good).

Finally, it is possible you may have some processes running that are consuming a lot of idle CPU, thus slowing down your machine overall. I had a bad widget that did this once. Open Activity Monitor and look at your "resting" CPU occupancy when you are not doing anything in particular with the machine. It should be pretty much zero (maybe 1% to 2% at most). If it not, identify the process or processes that are taking the time. What are they? Do you recognize them? Are they needed?

If you find one that is not needed, kill it and see how your machine starts to behave. If this is the cure, you will need to identify the startup item that launches it and delete it.

So, in summary then, take the following steps in order:
1/ Start with ensuring that your processor speed setting is full (applies to many Macs but not all)
2/ For Intel Macs, check for PPC processes and potentially prune them out
3/ Do Onyx based full maintenance
4/ Check that you have sufficient available disk space
5/ Search for processes that are consuming an unexpected amount of CPU

A final thought. If you routinely leave your web browser running when you are not using it, and have it open at a "busy" page like Mac-Forums, you will find that the Flash-based animated ads on the page consume a ridiculous amount of CPU time. If you want to leave your web browser loaded and running all the time, try pointing it a peaceful page like Google's basic search page - no ads, no unusual CPU consumption. This may help as well.

Do you have Linotype Font Explorer?

If so, try running all the cleanup tools in that - system and application font caches for example.

V. Interesting. I will give that a try over the weekend.

I have done those tests, I ran onyx and performed all the tests, it made little difference, well - none that I could notice. I killed most widgets that were taking up a lot of CPU, I only have a couple running now, which has sped it up a little bit, but only when accessing the dash, not the overall performance.

Interestingly, I ran activity monitor. You say that the idle, or resting CPU should be around 0 - 2%, mine is at about 95.52!!!!!

What do you recommend? How do I "kill" a process from activity monitor and which ones are safe for me to stop?

vaughan80 said:

Interestingly, I ran activity monitor. You say that the idle, or resting CPU should be around 0 - 2%, mine is at about 95.52!!!!!

Click to expand...

Erm... I've only been using my iMac approx. 72 hours and look at my idle CPU!
I only had the active monitor on.

OK, I have literally just turned my mac on (off all night), opened firefox and came straight here.
Enclosed is an image of my activity monitor. Is this good / bad?

100% Idle would mean it was zero CPU usage. You are reading that backwards. Look at the %user and %System and the graphs. If it was 96+% used the graphs would be all the way to the top.

See my Activity Monitor below. There is 100% CPU usage. Look at the idle. I am running Handbrake full tilt converting a video. Your Idle is about right for just activity monitor running.

I had a similar paroblem. Resetting Safari fixed it and speeded everything up.

Ok. Even still, it does not change the fact my mac is running slow.
I have half my HD left, uninstalled all printer rivers i dont use, fonts etc... And I don't use safari.

It has been noticeably slower since the leopard upgrade. I even did a total wipe and install to see if it made a difference.

Right now, i'm either thinking of going back to tiger, or just sticking with a slow mac. Unless of course, anyone here has a solution?

Perhaps you could define what "slow" means to you. It could be that we are trying to fix the wrong thing...

Two other things you could do... OS X reads the contents of your Documents folder and your Desktop upon boot up. If you have a lot of items in either/both of these, boot will be slower.
So, may I advise that you clean up these two areas and report back?

Personally, I take this message to heart and keep a very clean desktop. I also do not use the Documents folder at all, instead creating a separate "My Documents" folder where I keep all my stuff (I know that "My Documents" sounds Microsoft'ish, but it isn't intended to. I can't help if now and then they actually use a meaningful name for something - the name DOES fit in this case, so I use it).

Nothing on my desktop, however - I think you may have solved it. I had no idea it scanned the documents folder, which I have lots of files.

I'll give that a try and report back.

When I say slow, it is a number of things:

Basic OS use. Browsing in the HD, applications and my "home" folder can be slow.

Dock lags

Applications, particularly Word very slow on start-up, sometimes lag when typing.

Photoshop responding to basic functions - text tool, adding effects.

Final cut pro - rendering times have suddenly become real slow. Where a clip used to take 30 sec - 2 min to render, it takes at least 5/10