iMac slows down after few minutes of being used

Hi,

Something really strange happened to my iMac last week. It has been working totally fine for the last 5 years or so, but since last week, It turns on fine, works fine for 2-3 minutes and then the wheel starts spinning to the point that in becomes unresponsive.

I restarted it a million times, tried closing all applications, I looked at the Activity Monitor and CPU looks OK, it uses almost all of the 4GB RAM, but I closed some applications and it didnt work.

Any ideas?
Help!

Best,
Kris

Welcome to the Mac Forums.

Which version of OS X are you running on the iMac? If it's Snow Leopard or earlier, boot the machine with your install DVD and run Disk Utility from the DVD and perform a verify on the hard drive. If you're running Lion or later, boot to the recovery partition (command plus r), select utilities, and run Disk Utility to verify the hard drive.

It sounds like your hard drive is failing. It would be an excellent time to start backing up your data if have not already done so.

Hi, thanks for a quick answer!

I am running 10.9.5 on a 27-inch Mid 2011 iMac, with 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 with 4GB memory.

I ran Disk Utility and there were some problems (Incorrect number of File Hard Links) then it prompted me to Repair the disk. It reported that the disk was repaired successfully! But that didn't fix the problem.

Any other ideas?

When in Disk Utility and on the main hard drive, look at the bottom for SMART. What is the status of SMART?

Hopefully you took my advice and started making backups if you haven't already? Now that your hard drive has had some errors repaired...

How much free space is remaining on your hard drive? What kind of programs are you running? Also, 4 GB of memory is barely the minimum nowadays for any kind computing even doing very basic things. Think about adding more memory, at least another 4 GB.

We recommend running OnyX (the only cleanup and optimization tool that's safe) which can help speed things up somewhat. You can download OnyX for Mavericks from here. (It's free)

Some don'ts: Do not run any kind of file cleaner or optimization tool (except OnyX). Avoid running any kind of Anti-Virus software unless you absolutely have to (work environment), do not install MacKeeper, Clean My Mac, or the like. And, did I mention make backups? ;D

pepart said:

Hi, thanks for a quick answer!

I am running 10.9.5 on a 27-inch Mid 2011 iMac, with 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 with 4GB memory.

I ran Disk Utility and there were some problems (Incorrect number of File Hard Links) then it prompted me to Repair the disk. It reported that the disk was repaired successfully! But that didn't fix the problem.

Any other ideas?

Click to expand...

I'm running the same OS X version on the same iMac but with 20GB RAM.

As the problem just suddenly started I'd expect some software problem and I'd suggest shutting down and then boot up using Safe Boot Mode and see if things change.

Just hold down the shift key, but only when you hear the boot chime and until you see the spinning gear, and then select username and login.

To get back to normal OS operation, just restart.

Also have a look at Activity Monitor and see what the iMac is up to and if anything is goofy or running amok.