Extremely Slow imac (Help Please)

[nesp03]

I recently bought a new imac. It is starting to run extremely slow. When I do anything on the computer it can take up to 5 minutes. Just to get the dock to pop up takes several minutes. Even to type a letter on a document will take awhile. I am not sure what is happening. This just happened all of a sudden. I don't use the Internet very often, so I would be very surprised if it was a virus. Anybody have any ideas of what is going on?

 

[captaindan]

Try downloading Onyx and clean your cacheout it also cleans a lot of other stuff.

 

[captaindan]

I am kind of new to all this but I just started cleaning once a week. I will try to find the link for it.

 

[captaindan]

http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html
Try this

 

[awrence]

www.atomicbird.com Has a program called macaroni that works in the background tidying things up (all the cached and useless language files etc) that seems to work well an you can schedule it yourself.
Also I know the mac can be used for multitasking but there is a finite number of programs that can be opened at the same time.

 

[Simbad54]

You should probably check your permissions as well. Run Disk utility (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility)
Choose your Hard drive then click Verify Disk Permissions. It takes a while then click on repair if necessary.
Should help. There's also Mac Janitor, like Onyx.
Sim

 

[James]

I recently bought a new imac. It is starting to run extremely slow. When I do anything on the computer it can take up to 5 minutes. Just to get the dock to pop up takes several minutes. Even to type a letter on a document will take awhile. I am not sure what is happening. This just happened all of a sudden. I don't use the Internet very often, so I would be very surprised if it was a virus. Anybody have any ideas of what is going on?

Give more information on your system. What processor does it have, how much ram do you have... just what is it doing to be called slow? Are you running more than one program at a time? iMacs, especially the newer ones are not normally "slow" so it sounds like you may have a hardware problem.

Empy the trash and caches and run permissions and see if that makes any difference. How much drive space do you have left?

 

[nesp03]

I have a 17 inch 2.0 ghz intel core 2 duo. It came with 1gb memory and 160 gb hard drive. Everything I do on the computer goes slow. To open a program it takes several minutes. To select file and print it can take up to five minutes. I tried disk utility and it said that everything was fine. I called Apple, because I still have a warranty, but they don't think it is hardware. They won't take with me unless I purchase the Apple Protection plan. I am a huge Apple guy, but this is kind of frustrating. Thanks for your help. I will try cleaning my cache, but the computer goes so slow that may not even be possible.

 

[viridian]

Do a spyware scan and also check your network... and you may want to clean up you desktop because that may use up a lot of ram

 

[Alexis]

Have you installed any programs recently?

How are you connecting to the internet?

What programs appear in Activity Monitor?

 

[giulio]

You should restart in safe mode. When rebooting, hold down the shift key. Do some of the same operations and see if it's still slow. Then you'll know if something wacky is taking over your system, or the OS needs re-installing, etc. It's a good place to start. Let us know what happens after you try that.

 

[mac57]

Well, for what help it might be, my usual recipe for tuning up a slowing Mac:

First, check that your processor is running full speed. Go to Preferences, Energy Saver, Options and look at the drop box down near the bottom called Processor Performance. If it is not set to "Highest", set it to that right away. This maximizes performance, but for notebooks, it may run down the battery faster.

Next, download OnyX and run the complete set of clean up and maintenance scripts and then try again. Get OnyX at:

http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

Finally, you may wish to check that you have enough free space on your hard drive. Highlight the Macintosh HD icon on your desktop, CTL-click it and select Get Info from the resulting menu. Make sure you have a reasonable amount of space left. If not, a little spring cleaning may be in order.

There are two excellent apps for showing where all of your hard disk space has gone, Disk Inventory X and WhatSize. Get them at:

Disk Inventory X: http://www.derlien.com

WhatSize: http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize

Both do a great job at letting you zero in on your largest disk space consumers, so that you can hunt down any rogue files.

Do the OnyX thing first, then restart and try out one or both of the above tools. By the way, all three are freeware!

 

[nesp03]

I have tried several of the suggestions and nothing works yet. I went to check the processor speed in preferences. There wasn't anything in options. From what I understand the processor speed can only be changed in the laptops.

I also checked the free space. I have only used 21.4 GB and the computer has 131 GB capacity available.

When I pressed shift to start the computer in safe mode the computer would start to reboot and then it would shut off completely. So I wasn't ever able to open in safe mode.

The computer was going to slow last night to get onto the Internet, so I still haven't downloaded ONYX. I will try again today.

 

[mac57]

Since you say that it is "starting to go slowly" this implies that it once went quickly. First of all, OnyX or MainMenu is a must - run all the maintenance routines and evaluate again.

If that doesn't help, it is possible you have some processes running that are consuming a lot of idle CPU, thus slowing down your machine. I had a bad widget that did this once. Open Activity Monitor and look at your "resting" CPU occupancy when you are not doing anything with the machine. It should be pretty much zero (maybe 1% to 2% at most). If it not, identify the process or processes that are taking the time. What are they? Do you recognize them? Are they needed?

If you find one that is not needed, kill it and see how your machine starts to behave. If this is the cure, you will need to identify the startup item that launches it and delete it.

Good luck and keep reporting back!

 

[MacHeadCase]

Try creating a new user account and see if the speed is any better in that new account. Report back with your findings please.

Oh and welcome to Mac-Forums!

 

[giulio]

It wouldn't boot when you held down shift?

If it were me, I would completely reinstall OSX.

 

[iPaul]

thanks for all this info, will download onyx later on tonight, it looks good and hopefully will help speed up dashboard for me

 

[nesp03]

I downloaded OnyX last night. The computer is still running the same. Though when it was verifying startup disk it said there was an error. I am not sure if this means anything or not. My next step tonight is to download OS X. I tried this last night, but after two hours of working on the computer it became very slow. I tried to open iphoto to save my photos, but after thirty minutes iphoto still hadn't opened.

At moments the computer ran fine, but mostly it was very slow.

I also checked the CPU and it was working fine.

 

[MacHeadCase]

Create a new user account and use that one to see if it's faster.

 

[giulio]

Is this a hoax? The times you're quoting are astronomically long. Who would wait 30 mins for anything to happen? After 2 mins I'd hit the hard reset button.