Mud in my processor?!?!

i've noticed lately that my iMac is running VERY VERY VERY slow and sluggish lately. it's only been the last few weeks that it's gotten out of hand. lot's of beach balls and even slow mousing. the only changes that have happened lately...

* i connected the ethernet to a Linksys wireless router, (the wireless was slowing down my torrents) which then goes to a cable modem. there's a Pro G4 also on the router that's just idle all the time. it doesn't even have a monitor. but that's my extra storage until i get my 500G external.
* i moved about 200 gigs over to the G4 which freed up most of my main drive. ((the ex-PC side of me is absolutely screaming "DEFRAG!!" but i've heard that's not a good idea here...))
* and after that, i got the 10.4.10 update. and after that, i upgraded to Parallels 3.0...

all 3 of these happened around the same time so i'm not really sure what it could be. but i've also noticed that my BootCamp'ed PC games are a bit twitchy now...

any ideas??? would a defrag really be as bad as i've heard?

***time warp would probably be really nice right about now...***

When was the last time that you allowed the maintenance scripts to run? Repaired permissions? Ran a disk repair?

If you can't remember or simply haven't, then you would be obliged to do so.

Try using something like Onyx to do it all in one shot.

Have you got lot of applications installed on your Mac? Some of them run background processes even when they are not open which will eventually slow down your Mac. I had a similar problem and decided to remove the apps. I no longer use. Ever since my iMac runs much faster.

Sounds like something is chewing up cycles. Run the scripts from Onyx as was suggested, but also use Activity Monitor to see if there is a process eating up a load of CPU cycles.

i'll give onyx a shot, but for clarification, you said "allowed the maintenance scripts to run" are there scripts that i need to run?? i read a thread about defrag'ing that mention some process that was part of the OS that cleaned and arranged everything... that's why i stayed away from mac defrag programs. i'm guessing i misunderstood it...

ps - if there are scripts already there, are they in the apple scripts folder???

DaYCEnt said:

i'll give onyx a shot, but for clarification, you said "allowed the maintenance scripts to run" are there scripts that i need to run?

Click to expand...

You don't need to do anything for these scripts to run. All you need to do is keep your computer powered on and NOT in sleep mode.
These scripts are scheduled to occur early in the morning at 03:15 everyday, 04:30 on Saturdays, and 05:30 on the first day of each month, depending on the time zone your computer is set to. If you power down your system or put it into sleep mode, these tasks cannot run at those times. So that is what I meant by allowing them to run.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106978


Now if you have let it sleep or power off, then something like Onyx will do those same things when you want it to, rather than waiting for the scheduled time slot.