slow eMac. suggestions?

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Hello everybody. I have owned an eMac for about a year, and lately I've been noticing that it seems to be running pretty slowly, especially Safari. It takes about 20 seconds to open a page. Ironically, my computer hosts the router for my roomates computer, and her wireless internet speed is very fast.

Specs:
1 GHz G4 processor (80 gig hard drive, 35 gigs free)
768 MB SDRAM

I've run OnyX and it doesn't seem to make a difference.

Suggestions?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
'11 Macbook Pro i5 2.3 GHZ, 4GB, 10.10.4
I'll suggest the first thing that came in my mind... More RAM. My PowerMac is fast, and its older than your eMac. RAM makes all the difference.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Mac Studio, M1 Max, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD
Before doing anything radical, try the usual "tune up" steps for a sluggish Mac:

First, check that your processor is running full speed. Go to Preferences, Energy Saver, Options and look at the drop box down near the bottom called Processor Performance. If it is not set to "Highest", set it to that right away. This maximizes performance, but for notebooks, it may run down the battery faster. Note that not all Macs have this setting - laptops do, and my certainly my PowerMac G5 tower does, but not all Macs do.

Next, download OnyX and run the complete set of clean up and maintenance scripts and then evaluate again. Get OnyX at:

http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

Next, you may wish to check that you have enough free space on your hard drive. Highlight the Macintosh HD icon on your desktop, CTL-click it and select Get Info from the resulting menu. Make sure you have a reasonable amount of space left. If not, a little spring cleaning may be in order.

There are two excellent apps for showing where all of your hard disk space has gone, Disk Inventory X and WhatSize. Get them at:

Disk Inventory X: http://www.derlien.com

WhatSize: http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize

Both do a great job at letting you zero in on your largest disk space consumers, so that you can hunt down any rogue files (and both are freeware, which is good).

Finally, it is possible you may have some processes running that are consuming a lot of idle CPU, thus slowing down your machine overall. I had a bad widget that did this once. Open Activity Monitor and look at your "resting" CPU occupancy when you are not doing anything in particular with the machine. It should be pretty much zero (maybe 1% to 2% at most). If it not, identify the process or processes that are taking the time. What are they? Do you recognize them? Are they needed?

If you find one that is not needed, kill it and see how your machine starts to behave. If this is the cure, you will need to identify the startup item that launches it and delete it.

So, in summary then, take the following steps in order:
1/ Start with ensuring that your processor speed setting is full (applies to many Macs but not all)
2/ Then do Onyx based full maintenance
3/ Then check that you have sufficient available disk space
4/ Finally, search for processes that are consuming an unexpected amount of CPU
 
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Your Mac's Specs
iMac Alum 20'' 2.4GHz | iMac G4 | iPod Silver Nano 2GB
Verified/Repaired Disk Permissions lately?
 
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Ackkkkkk! Repairing permissions usually doesn't help. Unless you are running Classic on your machine, permissions don't just spontaneously reset themselves. See the following for an insightful view on why Repairing Permissions is not the answer to everything that goes wrong on your Mac!

http://www.unsanity.org/archives/000410.php

This is a good, and a fun, read.
 
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Go to Preferences, Energy Saver, Options and look at the drop box down near the bottom called Processor Performance.
Does an emac have this control, not having batteries? My G4 doesn't, so finding that control is missing might be confusing.
Next, download OnyX. . . .
Onyx didn't fix it. I'd bet a rogue widget is at fault. They can be turned off with Onyx.
 
S

seant

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hi guys am just new to the imac i have been using the pc for ages i was wondering about cleaning the mac, do i need some sort of registry mechanic etc and is the firewall enough of a virus protection if not anyone got any suggestions?

cheers
seant
 
M

MacHeadCase

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Seant, this thread is for an eMac. It would be best if you started your own topic with these questions you have: it would help others search in the forums for suggestions to the same question you have.
 

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