Reset mac

peterquinn said:

My iMac is running so slow I can hardly use the internet.

I`m thinking of restarting my I have the mountian lion cd but dont have the original mac OS disc that came with the iMac when I bought it

Can I restart the system with only the mountain lion disc?

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You can do a clean install with just the OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion disc, if it is indeed OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and not Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, since OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion does not come on a disc, unless you or someone else put it on a disc.

• How to Clean Install OS X Mountain Lion
• How to Do a Clean Install of OS X Mountain Lion

it is;

20-inch, Early 2008

Processor 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Memory 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

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2 GB of RAM is not enough for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. You can upgrade your iMac to 6 GB of 200-pin DDR2 SO-DIMM RAM via one 4 GB and one 2 GB module.

Lots of memory is free but it is so slow.

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Do you refer to the storage capacity, that is reported in Finder?

"Memory" is not the same as "hard drive / storage capacity":

• Computer Storage: Ram vs. Hard Drive Space
• RAM vs. Hard Disk

peterquinn said:

thanks, I updated my flash.

still slow

Click to expand...

Did you try anything else?

Open Activity Monitor and go to the System Memory* tab and look for Page Outs and Swap used and report back. Also select All Processes and then sort by CPU to show you the process(es) slowing down your Mac

Using Activity Monitor to show you CPU and RAM usage​

"2 GB of RAM is not enough for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. You can upgrade your iMac to 6 GB of 200-pin DDR2 SO-DIMM RAM via one 4 GB and one 2 GB module."

How to do that?

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You buy 4 GB of RAM from places like Newegg, get a normal Phillips #1 screwdriver and shut down your Mac and remove the bottom plate and replace the existing RAM modules. This guide shows you how.
I have a similar iMac model and it runs fine with 4 GB RAM and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

you are right, my disc is snow leopard. I think i should upgrade the memory before restarting.

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The term "restarting" refers to shutting the computer down and starting it up again, nothing more.
What you mean is "reinstalling the OS", which can be done via a clean install.

peterquinn said:

http://helpmymactokyo.blogspot.jp/

Here is a link to a screeenshot of my iMac activity monitor.

Does it look ok?

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It does look okay.

You can use the following applications to benchmark the speed of your HDD, to see, if it is the culprit:

• AJA System Test
• Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
• Xbench