Slow system

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Hi

Since some time my computer started acting very slowely, especially when browsing net using Safari. Other programs are slower too (Photoshop etc), but Safari takes sometimes a minute to go form one page to the other.
I have an e-Mac, OSX (10.4.9) with 80Gb of memory - 10Mgs left.
I know I should probaply reformat the whole thing, but hate the idea.
Tried repairing the disk permissions, cleaned all the cache and cookies.

Is there anything I can do to bring it back to it's regular shape other then reformatting?

Thanx for any help
 
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Get a larger HD and image the old one to the new one.

You can use either carbon copy cloner or disk utility. CCC is probably the better choice.

You should have 1 1/2 times the amount of total memory free on the HD at all times.

You can also use Disk Invetory X to view the data on your HD to see if there are large unwanted files or directories that you'd consider deleting.
 
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Where can I get CCC?

"You should have 1 1/2 times the amount of total memory free on the HD at all times." -- Not sure if I understand...since my HD is 80GB, 1 1/2 times of my memory makes 120GB...??? Does not make any sense. Did you mean one third of the total HD space?

thanx
 
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Mac Studio, M1 Max, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD
Before doing anything radical, you might want to follow the usual "recipe" for speeding up a Mac that is slowing down:

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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You should have 1 1/2 times the amount of total memory free on the HD at all times.

I haven't heard this rule of thumb before. Are you saying 1 1/2 times the amount of RAM I have in my computer should be free HD space? I have 1 gig of ram so I should have 1.5 gigs of free HD space? Or am I confusing memory, ram and storage?
 
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I haven't heard this rule of thumb before. Are you saying 1 1/2 times the amount of RAM I have in my computer should be free HD space? I have 1 gig of ram so I should have 1.5 gigs of free HD space? Or am I confusing memory, ram and storage?

Correct,...as you start to encroach on the end of your HD you will notice significant slow downs. Also if there is a memory dump or application crash you could end up with the screen that greys out and tells you to hold the power button in on your Mac to restart. It is also listed in many languages.
 

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