Mavericks slow and hesitant

I recently bought a new Core i5 mac mini running Mavericks and it's often slow. Chrome is often reluctant to open new tabs, Pages hesitates and waits rather a lot, Spotify sometimes won't run. Are there any known issues with Mavericks that I might try to sort? My mini has 4 gbs of memory and a 500gb hdd - not ssd. Thanks

There's a host of things that could be causing that, but a new machine should be running well. Take it to the nearest Apple Store and make a Genius appointment for it.

congratulations on the mini purchase now for the bad news.

Mac mini's where being shipped with have flashed firmwares on there hard drives this resulted in slow or completely laggy performance from the machine get your machine into a apple store a.s.a.p have them run a hard drive diagnostic.

had the exact same thing happen before my mini's drive decided to give up the ghost

How much of that memory is being used at any given moment? Take a look at Activity Monitor to see what might be using a lot of memory (I suspect this is part of the problem).

In addition to what's already been said, if that's a brand new Mini, then the 4 GB of memory is all it's ever going to have. If you're within the two week return period, I suggest returning it and purchasing a Mini with a least 8 GB of memory. However, I suspect your Mini is not brand new since it came with Mavericks installed. A new Mini should have Yosemite installed.

One place to start in the meantime might be the browser. Chrome is notorious for using both excessive amounts of power and memory (initially at least - it contains fairly well). Try using another browser especially if you use your browser a lot.

Right. this is my third attempt to post here - posts get deleted because I've previously logged in or some such. So last try.

Thanks to all. I suspect that Mavericks doesn't work very well with only 4gb memory. However, this mac is upgradeable - the current one is not, and not worth buying for that reason. Sales of this one overlapped with the latest one and mine is both new and does have Mavericks installed. I bought it in Dec 14.

Activity monitor shows very little memory hogging, other than the kernel and chrome. Memory pressure shows green. I've not tried Safari as it didn't work well with Snow Leopard, but I will. CPU usage is small %, and the 500 hard drive has 380+ free space.

I hadn't thought of the Apple warranty but after wrestling with the support site for a while i've managed to send a pdf of the receipt, with the serial number. Given the obscurity of this procedure I'm not expecting anything much from this, though I hope to be wrong.

Read post #2 by chas m and take it back. Simple.

harryb2448 said:

Read post #2 by chas m and take it back. Simple.

Click to expand...

Agreed!

Apple have now recognised my warranty and I've done the self test - no hardware problem detected. Things better since I switched to Safari from Chrome but still not great. Have booked Genius bar appt for next week.

Thanks to all.

Applestore checked the hardware - all OK - and then reset it to factory and it's nice and fast again. I did say that if I'd known that's all they would do I'd have done it myself. Ah yes, they said, but we do it quicker, and now it's logged by us and if you have problems we will fix it. There's a warranty anyway (I thought) - but don't ask me!

Anyway, apparently the most likely reason for the slowness is that I restored the entire time machine backup onto the new mac mini and this would have included the old Snow Leopard OS too, maybe causing confusion. So far I've restored applications and data only, using migration assistant - and I'll sniff around the "settings" option to see what they are before doing it.

Thanks to all for your advice.