iMac 24" 2.16 Running Slow

So I am working on an iMac 24" 2.16 C2D for a friend. It is just running terribly slow. It has been for a while now. He was running 10.5 and we thought it might be some bad system files so we did an upgrade to 10.6, no improvement. Then I suggested he upgrade the ram since he runs Parallels all the time. So we upgraded it to 4GB, still dog slow. (By slow I mean it takes probably 2-3 minutes to open any application.)

Where should I go now? Should I try a reinstall of SL? Bad hdd? new iMac?

What size drive and how much free space?

If 15% or more, probably the sign of a failing hard drive.

its a 250GB and he has about 30GB free. I can try and move some stuff to his external and see if that improves anything. He's had the iMac since it was release and I am not sure it has ever been turned off so it may be the HDD failing.

I had a brand new WD 1.5 TB fail in first 3 weeks with exactly the same symptoms a few months ago.

He's well under 10 % free space which will definitely slow the machine down, but shouldn't by that much.

Is there a ton of crap all over the desktop?

If there is, try this:

1. Move it all into a folder.
2. Move the folder into the user's "Documents" folder.

See if that helps.

I took another look at it and moved alot of old files to his external drive. He now has 110GB free out of the 250GB. I did a Verify disk and it came back fine. Did a repair permissions and it did need to fix a few permissions.

Overall it is running better now except when parallels is running.

What is the max ram supported in this device? 3GB or 4GB? About this mac shows 4GB but Activity monitor only shows 3GB under System Memory.

Parallels was set for 1240MB so I bumped it back to 1024MB and the mac os side runs better than (Activity monitor shows 400-500MB free).

I instructed him to suspend parallels when he is not using it and it seems to run alot better that way.

He is under warranty until 6/14/2010. Should I have him take it to the Apple Store to have the HDD checked because he is close to being Out of Warranty?

Thanks for all the help

Well, as long as he is still under warranty, it wouldn't hurt to take it to the Apple store. If they do some diagnostics, and find out the HDD is failing. Apple should replace it for free if that's what it turns out to be.

It's actually called a late '06 model - discontinued Aug '07.

Same as my '06 MBP, I have put 2 x 2GB sticks in it, but it's hardware limited to 3GB. That was still a lot of RAM only 3-4 years ago. And 5-7 yrs ago, we were paying $300-$350 for 2 x 512MB sticks for top of the line overclocking memory for our gaming rigs.

I use Fusion instead of Parallels with 1GB dedicated to the VM and rarely run into problems. I keep the OS X partition at about 50% free space at all times.

bobtomay said:

It's actually called a late '06 model - discontinued Aug '07.

Same as my '06 MBP, I have put 2 x 2GB sticks in it, but it's hardware limited to 3GB. That was still a lot of RAM only 3-4 years ago. And 5-7 yrs ago, we were paying $300-$350 for 2 x 512MB sticks for top of the line overclocking memory for our gaming rigs.

Click to expand...

Does about my mac show 4GB? And system profiler show 2GB sticks in each slot?

Thanks