Mid '07 iMac slow and unresponsive

My mid 07 iMac was working perfectly and then out of no where became incredibly slow and at periods totally unresponsive. It would take upwards of 15 minutes to start-up and programs ran so slow it was near impossible to even use. I ran disk utility, repaired, ran techtools, everything was fine, so i guessed that i had some sort of virus but my computer was so slow i couldnt run any type of scan. I decided to wipe my hard drive and reinstall os x but my computer is still painfully slow and can take several minutes to run the simplest processes. Anyone have any ideas? DO i have a hardware problem or is there something i can do software related?

Boxmonster said:

My mid 07 iMac was working perfectly and then out of no where became incredibly slow and at periods totally unresponsive. It would take upwards of 15 minutes to start-up and programs ran so slow it was near impossible to even use. I ran disk utility, repaired, ran techtools, everything was fine, so i guessed that i had some sort of virus but my computer was so slow i couldnt run any type of scan. I decided to wipe my hard drive and reinstall os x but my computer is still painfully slow and can take several minutes to run the simplest processes. Anyone have any ideas? DO i have a hardware problem or is there something i can do software related?

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This sounds like a very strange issue...especially considering that you wiped the hard drive & reinstalled the OS.

Did you:

- Use the disks that came with the iMac to do the install?
- What OS version did you reinstall?
- If you didn't use the disks that came with your computer, what did you use?...Grey/silver colored disks from a different computer...or retail disks (not grey colored usually black).

Thanks,

- Nick

pigoo3 said:

This sounds like a very strange issue...especially considering that you wiped the hard drive & reinstalled the OS.

- Nick

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You think it could be the PS. Not enough juice to the board. The IDE controller gone bad. Ive seen this in PC's with cooked processors.

Hey Boxmonster...If you boot with an OS install disc is it fast or slow to the installer window?

Check Activity Monitor

I had a problem with similar symptoms a few months back. About 5 mins after turning on, everything would run incredibly slow and jam as well. I checked activity monitor and found that the process syncservices was for some reason eating up all available RAM every time it started up.

My initial solution was to make an automator action to kill it every time the computer started, at the time I didnt need iSync so it wasnt a problem. However I eventually got the time to go into the mac store to get help with it. The first thing we tried was an archive reinstall (Leopard). This was unsuccessful but a quick delete of the pref files and a restart sorted the problem just fine.

So my suggestion is, check activity monitor to see if you have a rogue app thats stealing RAM / Processor Power and try to deal with that app, either by re-installing or wiping it's pref files....

Hope thats of some help!

Mac SK said:

You think it could be the PS. Not enough juice to the board.

Click to expand...

It would be a shame if the power supply on a 2007 computer went bad already.

- Nick

pigoo3 said:

It would be a shame if the power supply on a 2007 computer went bad already.

- Nick

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You got that right.... He wiped the drive that would have cleared out any rouge apps sucking up memory.

I had exactly the same problem with my MacBook!
The only cure is replacing the hard drive(s) completely.
There is no other way.

It becomes slow like that due to a drastic change in configurations (sometimes) or an error in the way in which the HDD and CPU register RAM and utilize it.
DO NOT SKIMP ON BUYING A NEW DRIVE!