My Mac has gotten slower with time

[dork420]

What's up

I am a pround owner of a 20' core duo iMac with a gig of Ram.
My question is this. My computer just seems slower lately, makes more noise, and is a bit quercky.
I repair permissions, and keep thing relatively clean. I have huge iphoto and itune libraries but still have pleny of room.

I went to the Apple store the other day and programs loaded so quickly. Safari was like a .5 bounce. Mine is like 3 bounces. It used to be faster. What happened?
What can I do?

I don;t run crazy programs. Mostly iLife, Azureus, web.

Any ideas?

[840quadra]

Try running a program that cleans up log files, caches, and misc files that gather up over time.

I use Onyx personally, and it is a great little janitor tool for spiffing up the system .

[Nevrsadie]

I will second Onyx, its a great ,free little program.

[dork420]

I will second Onyx, its a great ,free little program.


Are there caches and whatnot I shouldn't delete?

[lamina]

Third for Onyx.

Just use the maintenance, cleaning, and log files functions. You shouldn't be able to mess much up from those, and they will clean your system and free up some hard drive space.

Let us know how it works for you.

[mattscott306]

Fourth for onyx. As your computer goes, it collects and stores information, ONYX will get rid of what you don't need, and give you a little speed back.

[dork420]

Third for Onyx.

Just use the maintenance, cleaning, and log files functions. You shouldn't be able to mess much up from those, and they will clean your system and free up some hard drive space.

Let us know how it works for you.


I really don;t need to free up space at the moment.

[runplaysleeprun]

I really don;t need to free up space at the moment.

Freeing up space is not its only purpose. Its not the free space that will make your mac faster (in this case), but what's being deleted to make the free space.
I suppose i'm fifthing onyx.

[macg4]

i 6th onynx its a great little tool. i run mine once a week at least

[Angrist]

Azureus never really quits on it's own.

If you go to the activity monitor it'll still be running and needs to be quit from there. That shouldn't cause TOO much of a slow down, but it'll contribute.

Also, if you have any peripherals like a palm pilot many times they install startup items that eat processor cycles.

[someguy]

7th for Onyx. :)

[Eidorian]

1st for Maintenance

Onyx farked my Spotlight database and comments. I will never use it again.

[Skrilla™]

erase entire disk and start from scratch! :)

[WillJS]

erase entire disk and start from scratch! :)

Did that yesterday! :D .................... :(

7th for onyx

[Skrilla™]

Did that yesterday! :D .................... :(

7th for onyx


It really isn't that bad, some people on here seem to avoid it like the plague ;) . Especially if you back up your documents/pictures, etc on a regular basis or have an extra hard drive or iPod to store it on while you erase.

I really don't have that much on my MacBook so it is very easy for me. My Windows box is a different story.

[WillJS]

It really isn't that bad, some people on here seem to avoid it like the plague ;) . Especially if you back up your documents/pictures, etc on a regular basis or have an extra hard drive or iPod to store it on while you erase.

I really don't have that much on my MacBook so it is very easy for me. My Windows box is a different story.

True. All I had to backup was my iTunes library.. 4GB. Took maybe an hour storing it on our home network (wirelessly). Just had to re-download like 2 programs. :cool:

[toothpaste]

I dropped windows so that I wouldn't have to back up, format and re-install everything every few months. I have a big itunes library. I want to save my playcounts and rating, not really keen on the procedure of formatting the disk to improve performance.

OS X core is based on a form of unix. There should be plenty of utilities that assist in making the system run smoothly without reformatting. That is just silly talk. Silliness I tell ya.

[jeremy.king]

It really isn't that bad, some people on here seem to avoid it like the plague ;) .

It's not that its avoided, most of the time is unnecessary and its a waste of time. :rolleyes:

Suprised nobody has even suggested you take a look at Activity Viewer to get a feel for what you are running in the background, look at CPU utilization, free memory, page ins/outs, etc...

Have you bothered running the daily,weekly,monthly scripts? Have you tried rebooting? Cleaning the caches will only force them to be rebuilt on a reboot.

I guess you could kill a fly with a sledgehammer, but I'd suggest you figure out why its slow instead of just stabbing at solutions and definitely before a reinstall...

[dukebound85]

Is it slow when you just open safari for the first time? try opening close, then open it again and see if it loads alot faster. the reason it does is because its preloaded in the ram in a sense

[Zwhaler]

Onyx farked my Spotlight database and comments. I will never use it again.

Ah, after reading this, I guess I will wait until Time Machine (until I use Onyx) so incase I mess something up, I can go back in time :cool: My iMac is faster than **** but still it sounds nifty :)

[mrgreen4242]

Until recently I didn't realize the amount of slowdown harddrives experience as they fill up. You can experience a 30% drop in read speed as a harddrive goes from 10% full to 90%.

So, as you accumulate more "junk" you can slow your system down a bit... not a lot, but launch times can get slower and access to virtual memory (if you are low on real memory) can slow down even more. You can try backing up unused files to DVD-Rs and deleting them from your computer to see if that helps.

You can also invest in a second external drive (get a FW one!) and move all your media out to that. That sort of data tends to accumulate the fastest, but also has minimal need for high disc speed. That may help keep some free space on your main drive and maintain a higher average read/write speed.

[Eidorian]

Ah, after reading this, I guess I will wait until Time Machine (until I use Onyx) so incase I mess something up, I can go back in time :cool: My iMac is faster than **** but still it sounds nifty :)I didn't realize my comments were gone until after I had overwritten my last good back up. You can use Onyx. Just make sure it's not messing around with Spotlight.