Mac sluggish performance

I keep getting spinning rainbow wheel,my Mac is 5,1 OS-X 10.6.8

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Your 5.1 iMac is now ten years old, showing its age, limited memory capabilities and slow CPUs and graphics.

However how some improvements can be made but at a cost. How much memory is installed, how full is the hard drive, do you run any cleaning utilities or antivirus software on it?

Probably best thing you can do is max out the Ram , get an SSD drive speeds things up and run the latest OS follow these things helped me on my 2010MBP maxed ram out took out DVD and put in OWC's data doubler and installed 2x 750gig SSD running in raid it is super fast probably added an extra 10 years of service to it....

ragu said:

Probably best thing you can do is...

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The best thing to do is not invest any additional $$$ in a 10 year-old computer with a max. OS of 10.7.5 Latest OS version is 10.11 (4 versions newer). The $$$ spent on ram & SSD for a 10 year-old iMac is not worth it.

Yes…on your 2010 MacBook Pro it was worth it. But not on a 2006 iMac (IMHO).

- Nick

Thanks guess your are right did not relalise which model he had...

pigoo3 said:

The best thing to do is not invest any additional $$$ in a 10 year-old computer with a max. OS of 10.7.5 Latest OS version is 10.11 (4 versions newer). The $$$ spent on ram & SSD for a 10 year-old iMac is not worth it.

Yes…on your 2010 MacBook Pro it was worth it. But not on a 2006 iMac (IMHO).

- Nick

Click to expand...

ragu said:

Thanks guess your are right did not relalise which model he had...

Click to expand...

It's all good.

This 2006 iMac is probably only worth about $100 (ram & SSD upgrades would exceed that easily). The max OS on it is also 10.7.5 (an outdated OS in many areas).

You did a great job upgrading your 2010 MBP. I bet it feels much faster…a good investment (much less $$$$ than a new computer)!

- Nick