my imac has slowed down

[biafran]

I have a G4 Imac 20 inch 1.8ghz that the whole family uses. My son does his homework on this as well plays lots of games. Well we have managed to clutter the desktop, start up time and computing time has gotten slower and slower. Anyone out there know how I can clean up my cache? How can I make this thing zip like it did when I first brought it home.

[mad jew]

You can manually delete your many of your caches from the Caches folder in the various Libraries on your machine. However, this isn't necessarily your problem. How much free space do you have on the hard drive? How many apps are running? How much RAM do you have? What are your startup and login items? If you open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder, what seems to be using the most CPU percentage and real RAM? :)

[darwen]

I doubt the issue is going to be cache, this rarly will slow down the computer. It is probably, as the previous post mentioned, due to a lack of space on the hard drive. Check that out. Cache is a very small amount of info and would not take up much space.

[dingdongbubble]

Try rebuilding the permissions. lol:apple:

How about re installing to a fresh install.

[mad jew]

Hopefully we'll be able to fix the issue without the hassle of a complete reinstall. :p

[ezekialjazz]

Barring disk related issues (run fsck in single user mode), try running Cocktail - it will do all the maintenance stuff that OS X needs (prebind, cron scripts, cache deletion, permission repair).

You could also open Activity Monitor and view all processes. You can see the CPU/Ram hogs there.

If you don't want to pay for Cocktail, most of its functionality (cron jobs, permission repairs, update prebinding) is available with a freeware app called Onyx, which gets good reviews at VersionTracker and MacUpdate.
It can be downloaded from here (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11582).

[Zwhaler]

Yeah I second Onyx, and also try checking out your login items (system prefs, accounts) delete anything you do not need

[IJ Reilly]

Hopefully we'll be able to fix the issue without the hassle of a complete reinstall. :p

You are beginning to make my presence on these boards almost entirely redundant.

[mad jew]

Nah mate, you did that yourself. :p

Kidding. I'm not as extreme as you when it comes to avoiding reinstalling, but I agree that far too many users leap straight into it before properly troubleshooting their problems.