iMac getting slow

Greetings - I'm Jerrie from Oregon. I switched to an iMac in 2009 shortly before retiring after 21 years of PC support for a large utility, Sometimes I miss the simplicity of DOS. After 5 years on my iMac I'm having trouble figuring out how to resolve a noticeable decrease in response time. Perhaps it's just tired, but probably the hard drive is cluttered up. Any sage advice from the experts would be appreciated, or just point me to a current thread. Thanks.

Moved post to it's own thread.

1st question...
What size is the drive - how much used space and how much free space?

Jerrie said:

Greetings - I'm Jerrie from Oregon.

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Hello & welcome…Jerrie from Oregon!

Jerrie said:

I switched to an iMac in 2009 shortly before retiring after 21 years of PC support for a large utility, Sometimes I miss the simplicity of DOS. After 5 years on my iMac I'm having trouble figuring out how to resolve a noticeable decrease in response time.

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What Mac OS version was on the computer when you purchased it 5 years ago…and what OS version is on it now?

How much ram does it have?

- Nick

And what have you installed to "help" the OS? Any Antivirus? MacKeeper or some similar package?

Oh, and welcome to the forum!

Don't take MacInWin's post above as ANY KIND of a suggestion ... he's trying to find out if you've installed any known BADWARE.

At five years, it's probably your drive starting to fail, or too full (or both).

That's why the "help" was in quotes. That crapware that claims to help OSX pretty much gums it up, as you know.

Jerrie said:

Greetings - I'm Jerrie from Oregon. I switched to an iMac in 2009 shortly before retiring after 21 years of PC support for a large utility, Sometimes I miss the simplicity of DOS.

Click to expand...

What?!