need an upgrade!! But don't know what to upgrade.

Wondering if you can help again folks. My mac pro has recently been upgraded to mavericks OS, but its now a little slow, reminds me of an old PC. How do I speed things up. I use clean my mac and have deleted 250gb of space but my mac is not swift. I am not even working on it yet but have noticed its gotten slow. my specs are as follows
Processor 2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512 MBSoftware OS X 10.9.1 (13B42)

Is there something I can buy and install myself to make my computer fast again. I keep my mac clean of all large files, so why is the system running slow. as for emptying my rubbish bin these days forget it! I have to use trash it app. Please keep you answer simple I don't know too much about computers. Thanks

The quickest thing you can do to give your system a boost is upgrading the memory. You don't say what specific version your Mac Pro is, but assuming it's this 2008 Mac Pro, the Apple supported max memory is 32GB but you can actually go up to 64GB. You probably don't need to go that high, but I'd at least upgrade up to 16GB.

The next thing is to ensure you have enough free space on your HD, so you said you freed up 250GB of space. How many drives do you have and what's your total free space?

What version of OS X did you upgrade from?

idealmethod said:

Wondering if you can help again folks. My mac pro has recently been upgraded to mavericks OS, but its now a little slow, reminds me of an old PC. How do I speed things up. I use clean my mac ...

Click to expand...

Not that many folks have complained about their computer slowing down after upgrading to Mavericks (assuming the previous OS wasn't too old).

Also...we really don't recommend using "Clean My Mac". Some/many of these pay-for "cleaners" cause more problems than they are worth. We usually recommend the free program called "Onyx". I would recommend uninstalling "Clean My Mac".

- Nick

On a computer that old - having deleted 250 GB of data - you didn't tell us what size the drive is - I'm going to be in the minority here, but have to recommend a defrag on that drive.

Either get iDefrag - sort of expensive for a one time use - will be worth it if you are moving a lot of large files on/off the drive.

Or, make a Time Machine backup or clone it with SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner - verify the backup is good - then wipe the drive, clean install the OS and during the installation when it asks - have it restore the data from your backup - this will effectively defrag the drive.

Give that cleaning system the heave-** also any antivirus software you may have installed. Not knowing what has been discarded, think the best plan may be to clone the drive to an external or drive in bay 2 or 3, download Mavericks again from the App Store, again no charge, burn to a USB thumb drive prior to running, boot from the thumb drive, format the hard drive and do a clean install of Mavericks.

And by all means increase memory to at least 8GB.

Follow this guide for making the thumb drive:-

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2013/10/how-to-create-an-os-x-mavericks-usb-installation-drive/