1st gen Intel 2006 20 inch Imac soooo slow!

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Hi

Hard drive failed so I have replaced my hard drive, installed Snow Leopard and 2gb new RAM in addition to one 512mb of RAM which previously had. It ran like a dream for about a month then the screen froze, mouse would work but nothing would respond then it crashed, grey screen, spinning wheel etc. Reinstalled Snow Leopard and it was very slow and wouldn't get past the location choice and kept running in circles back a step to the welcome screen. Did a hardware check with the grey install disk and it came up with nothing. Thought ok bad OSX install, did a clean install and disk repair. Now it has installed properly this time but it's really slow. Any ideas? Hard Drive again or RAM issue? Suggestions please. Many thanks.
 

pigoo3

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Bad or incompatible RAM? My best guess, try putting the old memory back in as a test.

Cheers :)

Hugh
 
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Um thought about that but old memory is 2 x 512gb sticks which would probably not be enough to run Snow Leopard properly anyway so might get same result? Will try though, it's easy enough to do compared to fishing around inside one of these things! Thanks.
 
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1gb will be enough to boot up and find out if the new RAM is bad, well worth the test to resolve this problem or at least eliminate one component from the list.

Cheers :)

Hugh
 
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I only have 1gb in my 20" gen 1, and it runs Snow Leopard fine. Well, except for the fact that my hard drive also just crashed and it doesn't run at all right now. I had trouble using more than 1 stick in mine and never had it resolved. The 1.5gb on the info bar that I state never actually worked.
 
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Um thought about that but old memory is 2 x 512gb sticks which would probably not be enough to run Snow Leopard properly anyway so might get same result? Will try though, it's easy enough to do compared to fishing around inside one of these things! Thanks.

I have 1 gig ( 512x2) running snow leopard on my first gen macbook just fine. I also remember back in 2006 when I bought this mac when I added 2 512 ram sticks their was a lot of discussion about only apple branded ram working properly, so I bought apple ram. This could be your problem since it's from that generation.
 
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Where did you purchase the additional memory and are you 100% certain it is Mac compatible?
 
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I did not use Apple "certified" RAM in mine, the 1gb stick works fine. Apple isn't using anything special. The second bay just won't recognize anything, even the original 512 that I have.
 
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Hi there. All seems to be working fine now for some reason. The original RAM I had with it was Samsung anyway. I have Kingston in there now and it's def compatible. I'm not counting my chickens but so far so good. It's not super snappy, little bit of the old beachball but I am just sooo happy to have my old friend back again! Thanks for your replies guys.
 

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