Mid 2011 iMac being slow.

Hi. My dad's iMac has been running really slow lately, and he asked me if I knew what was wrong since I am fairly tech-savvy.

Unfortunately I pretty much only know about PCs, and hardware in general. (I build gaming PCs and stuff, but have very little experience with OSX.)

Anyway, I don't really know what is going on. A 2.5 GHz i5 combined with 4GB of DDR3 should be able to handle OSX.

From what I can tell from the "Activity Monitor" it may be the RAM, though I am not that familiar with how OSX allocates memory and swap-space and whatnot. During regular use there is only between 10MB and 300MB free and about 500MB on the swap. In Windows that would be terrible, but as I said, I don't really know how OSX handles memory.

There aren't a bunch of programs open simultaneously. All that is open most of the time is Safari, Mail and iTunes.

If I were to upgrade the RAM, would something like this do?
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145280

Based on the specifications it should. (DDR3 10600 1333MHz.)

I've seen some sticks that say they work for sure with iMacs, but they are all ridiculously overpriced. I saw one 4GB stick for $70. The 16GB of DDR3 1866 in my computer only cost a little more than that.

Thanks,

quasinormal said:

That iMac will have 4 RAM slots, so you can upgrade to 8GB by adding another 2 x 2GB SO-DIMMs. A lot of people will have these lying around after upgrading their 2011 machines so you should be able to pick up a pair cheap.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4621

Click to expand...

According to that the RAM I linked will work.


There isn't anything unusual in the activity monitor. Something along the lines of "kernel_task" or something is using up the most, and even that is only 500MB with like "1.5" on the CPU. (Is that a percent?)


So is the RAM the problem?