Slow 2012 iMac

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Hello, I have an iMac from 2012 and it happens to row and be a little slow when I use Final Cut Pro and Photoshop. Is it possible to upgrade it?
 

IWT


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Hello, I have an iMac from 2012 and it happens to row and be a little slow when I use Final Cut Pro and Photoshop. Is it possible to upgrade it?

A warm welcome to Mac-Forums. Delighted to help, though I suspect or Admins or Mods will move your post to a better location within the Forums.

To help us in answering your question, we have to know which of several models from 2012 you have.

So please can you tell us the exact details, eg, 21.5" - 27" - plus the current Operating System (OS), amount of RAM etc. You can obtain all that info by clicking on the Apple icon, top menu bar, far left and choosing "About This Mac".

Ian
 
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A warm welcome to Mac-Forums. Delighted to help, though I suspect or Admins or Mods will move your post to a better location within the Forums.

To help us in answering your question, we have to know which of several models from 2012 you have.

So please can you tell us the exact details, eg, 21.5" - 27" - plus the current Operating System (OS), amount of RAM etc. You can obtain all that info by clicking on the Apple icon, top menu bar, far left and choosing "About This Mac".

Ian
Hi, thanks for reaching out. I'm using iMac (27-inch, late 2012)
Processor: 3.2 GHZ Intel Core i5
Memory: 5GB 1600MHz dor3
Graphics NVDIA GeForce GTX675MX 1024MB
OS: macOS Catalina 10.15
Thank you so much!
 

IWT


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Hi, thanks for reaching out. I'm using iMac (27-inch, late 2012)
Processor: 3.2 GHZ Intel Core i5
Memory: 5GB 1600MHz dor3
Graphics NVDIA GeForce GTX675MX 1024MB
OS: macOS Catalina 10.15
Thank you so much!

I'm replying again with quotes in case this part of the thread is moved. At least our posts will be linked.

Thanks for your prompt and very useful reply. I now know, for example, that it is the apps that that need "upgrading" rather than your Operating System (OS), which is the latest.

The slowness could have many causes - your Mac's Hard Drive may be too full, or may be failing. As regards the former, what is the storage capacity of your Hard Drive and how much free/unused space is available?

What versions of Photoshop and Final Cut Pro (FCP) do you have? As regards upgrading these, it's pretty easy to find out if there are newer versions (I use neither). They are likely to be expensive and before paying out big money, I think we need to establish that your iMac is working as it should be. You mention 5GB RAM; that must have been an addition by you?? I think 4GB would have been standard.

And is the slowness ONLY with Photoshop and FCP? Or is it across the board, surfing, mail etc.

Ian
 
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Hi, thanks for reaching out. I'm using iMac (27-inch, late 2012)
Processor: 3.2 GHZ Intel Core i5
Memory: 5GB 1600MHz dor3
Graphics NVDIA GeForce GTX675MX 1024MB
OS: macOS Catalina 10.15
Thank you so much!

I largely agree with IWT's assessment. You mention having 5 GB memory, which must be a typo because that's not possible (at least I don't think you can get RAM in that configuration. If you did, it may be non-standard and problematic itself). For the apps you are running, and even more especially under Catalina, you really need to have at least 16 GB. You also didn't mention what kind of internal drive you have, but as IWT said, your problems could be rooted in being short on free space. On top of that though, there seems to be a consensus that Catalina doesn't perform very well when booted from an HDD. If you don't have an SSD internally, that may be a complicating factor.
 
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yuanyasmine
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I'm replying again with quotes in case this part of the thread is moved. At least our posts will be linked.

Thanks for your prompt and very useful reply. I now know, for example, that it is the apps that that need "upgrading" rather than your Operating System (OS), which is the latest.

The slowness could have many causes - your Mac's Hard Drive may be too full, or may be failing. As regards the former, what is the storage capacity of your Hard Drive and how much free/unused space is available?

What versions of Photoshop and Final Cut Pro (FCP) do you have? As regards upgrading these, it's pretty easy to find out if there are newer versions (I use neither). They are likely to be expensive and before paying out big money, I think we need to establish that your iMac is working as it should be. You mention 5GB RAM; that must have been an addition by you?? I think 4GB would have been standard.

And is the slowness ONLY with Photoshop and FCP? Or is it across the board, surfing, mail etc.

Ian
Sorry for the late reply.
Yes, 5GB is the available space of my macintosh HD. Only the Photoshop and FCP ran slowly yesterday. But today, everything is slow and I can't even use the computer at all.
I guess the hard drive or OS is problematic?
So what should i do? Should I downgrade to macOS Mojave? Or reinstall macOS Catalina?
 
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Sorry for the late reply.
Yes, 5GB is the available space of my macintosh HD. Only the Photoshop and FCP ran slowly yesterday. But today, everything is slow and I can't even use the computer at all.
I guess the hard drive or OS is problematic?
So what should i do? Should I downgrade to macOS Mojave? Or reinstall macOS Catalina?

You only have 5 GB of free space on the hard drive? There’s problem number one. Your drive is effectively full. You will not be able to do anything, and I mean literally anything, until you free some space up. Do you have any idea why your drive is so full?
 

chscag

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Moved to a new thread here in "Desktops".

Please create a new thread rather than post a new subject to an existing thread.

Thanks and welcome to our forums.
 

IWT


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Sorry for the late reply.
Yes, 5GB is the available space of my macintosh HD. Only the Photoshop and FCP ran slowly yesterday. But today, everything is slow and I can't even use the computer at all.
I guess the hard drive or OS is problematic?
So what should i do? Should I downgrade to macOS Mojave? Or reinstall macOS Catalina?

This is a pretty dire situation, I'm sorry to say.

To be clear - no offence intended -

Memory is also known as Working Memory, RAM, PRAM and is in the range of 4 to 32GB; 8GB being generally accepted as the minimum for good operational use with macOS Catalina. What is yours? You said 5GB, but maybe you are confusing this with the storage space left???

Storage is the amount of space on the Hard Drive for storing the OS, and everything else and can be from 128GB up to 4TB on the latest iMacs.

What you appear to be telling us is that you only have 5GB of STORAGE space left - out of what, BTW? And given the confusion, what RAM do you have?

And now the DON'TS: Do not attempt to downgrade to macOS Mojave or reinstall macOS Catalina.

What to DO: Move at least 100GB from your Hard Drive to an EHD. In fact, the more storage space you can move out the better. Think of things like Photo libraries, Music libraries, large Documents etc.

And another crucial thing is Backups. Do you have Time Machine or a cloned Backup (BU)?

The situation you are in could potentially lead to loss of all your data. Obviously we all want to avoid that.

So: top priority, move out at least 100GB of data to an External Hard Drive (EHD) - more than that if possible.

Backup your iMac.

Ian
 
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hi there

I think the best thing we should all ask is if the OP can take a screen shot of about this Mac that way we can help assist much better


as this 5GB ram becomes 5GB of HDD storage space left has confused us all

but either way 5GB of ram isn't enough to run Final Cut Pro and photoshop happily anyway,

but if its correct and the storage space is full I'm going to echo IWT here and say yes you should free up more than 5GB of storage space as that's not ideal in any form,

and will only make the machine dire to use.
 

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