Dead Slow

[reneeaz]

My Mac is dead slow. Running Catalina 10.15.7. Its an older Mac and takes forever to do anything on it or to open programs even if only one thing open at a time. Memory is 8 gb. Do I need a good cache cleaner and if so, which one is best? Thanks

 

[ferrarr]

Get Maintenance app here, Titanium Software | Operating System Utilities for Mac - Maintenance. Be sure to select the correct version for Catalina.

Install it.
Run it.
Restart.

 

[Rod]

This article by one of our long time members may be helpful to you as you are running an older Mac. Macintosh Routine Maintenance It gives you a checklist of things to consider but top of the list for me and often overlooked is limited storage space.
If you have less than 10% of your storage free it's likely that you will see the symptoms you describe. The recommended free storage on a spinning hard drive (HDD) is around 20%. So check that first.
Not discounting ferrarr's suggestion above, the Maintenance App will certainly clean out your caches but that may not be your only issue.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

My Mac is dead slow. Running Catalina 10.15.7. Its an older Mac and takes forever to do anything on it or to open programs even if only one thing open at a time. Memory is 8 gb. Do I need a good cache cleaner and if so, which one is best? Thanks

A cleaner app is unlikely to do anything other than lighten your wallet. You also don't need more RAM or an SSD, though there will be folks who will tell you that's what you need.

I have a Web site devoted to fixing Mac slowdowns:

Macintosh Slowdown Solutions

The most likely causes (in this order):
- Running fully interactive anti-virus software, especially Sophos
- Internal rotating disk hard drive too full (around 80% full and your Mac is likely to be brought to its knees)
- Failing hard drive

Go through the suggestions on that page and see if any of them help. Please come back and tell us about the results.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Before we provide ideas..

What Mac do you have? Provide all the specs, also indicate how you use your machine.

 

[reneeaz]

Get Maintenance app here, Titanium Software | Operating System Utilities for Mac - Maintenance. Be sure to select the correct version for Catalina.

Install it.
Run it.
Restart.

Before we provide ideas..

What Mac do you have? Provide all the specs, also indicate how you use your machine.

Mac 27" (late 2013) running Catalina version 10.15.7

 

[Raz0rEdge]

OK, so you have 8GB of memory from your first post. What kinds of things do you on the machine? What takes forever? Define what is slow.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

Mac 27" (late 2013) running Catalina version 10.15.7

One problem that I can see right off. I'm guessing that you have an internal rotating disk hard drive (i.e. not an SSD). Correct?

Did you notice that your Mac started running like crap after you upgraded from a pre-Mojave (OS 10.14) version of the OS to Mojave or later?

What happened is that when you installed Mojave or later your internal RDHD got reformatted (non-optionally) from HFS+ (which is optimized for RDHD's) to APFS (which is optimized for SSD's, and which causes RDHD's to perform noticeably less well.)