Hi
Maybe someone around can help me a bit ...
I´ve been on Mac laptops since ever ... started on 91 with a 100 c and my last one was a Macbook ( black ) 2,4 GHz cure duo.
After getting an iPad I saw no reason for a laptop anymore so got myself an 21´iMac which is eligible for the HD replacement program ..
My problem actually is that I am not very happy with the performance of my iMac, I found the 2,4 MB to perform better ( its a cuore duo 3,2 GHz mid 2010 with 4 Gb Ram ) iPhoto takes maybe 1/2 minute to open and probably the same time to close , iTunes is a bag of pain , playing a movie freezes much to often specially when pausing the movie and trying to play it again ,terrible , opening pages .. etc it really feels slow ..
Are 4 GB of Ram not enough ? or the performance issues has to do with the HD ?
I ask you cause if Apple is going to replace my HD I could ask them at the same time to upgrade the RAM to 8 GB and replace my superdrive which busted two months passed the guarantee ..
By the way .... it would be my 3rd superdrive , ibook G4 , Macbook 2,4 and now my iMac all SD´s busted and I hardly use them , What is wrong with Apple´s SD´s ?
Thanks
Regards
I recently went through this process of trying to squeeze every bit of the iMac I recently bought.
I upgraded the RAM to 16 GB( even though people say you could stick 32 GB).
Was migrating from Windows so had years of documents and files lying around on various external drives.
So anyways, after I was done transferring/deleting/moving into my iMac, I noticed that my internal hard drive was making a lot of grinding noise. Most likely heavy defragmenation.
After researching the whole issue of defragmenation on Mac's in general, I found there are two camps of people. One who say the OS X is advanced enough to not try to fill every nook and cranny of empty space and rather writes large files to the available empty space in your hard drive. The other camp that even though that's true, you are still left with lot of empty spaces.
So the software to do that is likely iDefrag or Speed disk or something.
As a last ditch attempt, i backed up my Mac to my Time Machine and then did a restore.
No more grinding noises and my programs are fast and zippy.That seems to have fixed the defrag issue..
I also wanted to tweak the network side of things to see what could be improved. Realized this whole IPv6 stuff is chaos. Lot of ISP's don't support it yet and if you have IPv6 turned on in your mac make it to "Link Local" only. Your internet lookup's are fast. And lastly, make sure the DNS servers you use are the fastest. Your local ISP's DNS server's are necessarily not the fastest. Try this utility from Google
http://code.google.com/p/namebench/
It figures out the best DNS servers for you based on your location. My ping times have improved and so have lookups. I had OpenDNS before and have switched to Google DNS servers, even faster.
So you could upgrade the RAM and then do a backup and restore and it will defenitely help.
Get a fast external drive and dump your iTunes and iPhoto library into it and it gets even better. I went the thunderbolt way and 60 GB worth of Pics in iPhoto is fast and snappy.
Even after all that you are not satisfied then you have to get a new mac...