1 year later, my Mac is slow..

[maxrobertson]

I have 1 GB of RAM. But that's irrelevant as I'm not going to upgrade my hardware. I was happy with the performance of my machine when I bought it. A hardware upgrade is both unnecessary and impractical for me. So, no, it's not "the answer." My harddrive is 120 GB and I have 10 GB free. I suspect this is the cause of decreased performance. Unfortunately I don't have time to back up everything I need and reinstall OS X. There's too much stuff, fonts, unorganized data, etc. I just want to know if there there any apps that will boost OS performance. Much appreciated.

First off, I agree that you shouldn't have to upgrade your computer to make it work better. If you were fine with the performance before, it should be fine now. However, system updates might have made it slower, I'm not sure, and 1 GB is pretty low (I know I wish I had 2).

But anyway, no application is going to magically improve your performance. You need to delete things you don't need. If you can afford it, buy an external hard disk, or a 4 GB flash drive and move as many files as you can that you don't need often to it. Also, if you don't use all of the applications you have installed, a lot of them can take up surprisingly large amounts of space, so you could also try removing some. The only other suggestion I have is to try Monolingual, which can free up a lot of space. Some people say it can cause problems, though, so try at your own risk.

 

[Consultant]

Haha, maybe later. I do know that I've had this computer for less than a month, and I went from 50gb of free space to 5gb in approximately 5 days, deliberately. I'd definitely have noticed a slowdown over such a short span of time, and I haven't. Firefox, iTunes, etc. behave normally, whether I'm at 200mb (as I was a few minutes ago) or 2gb (as I currently am) or 20gb (as I was last week). I truly don't notice a difference.

Yes, you might still run ok with 200mb of free space if you have low demanding apps open. Why don't you try to run iMovie or Photoshop with that much space left? My advice is for 99% of users, not for the exception of less than 1% of users.

As much as you think you are right, YOU ARE NOT.
It is not physically possible due to the simple reason:
Harddrives are physically slower when they are full. No matter what the OS is.
(unless you use a RAID array and use one disk back to front, to even out the speed loss, but that's NOT under this discussion here).

Compare the benchmark of 90% full with other benchmark and see.
http://barefeats.com/hard68.html

Slower write / read when harddrive is full = slower speed.
It may not APPEAR to be different to you, but it IS different.
You can BELIEVE whatever you want, but I am just pointing out the truth.
Why don't you benchmark it yourself?

 

[IJ Reilly]

I was merely repeating what you'd already written.

A veritable chorus of reason!

 

[BornAgainMac]

You will see performance drop when you reach 80% of your disk capacity. Performance goes down as your approach 100% of your drive space.

 

[Naimfan]

Try WhatSize to see what's taking up the most space on your drive. If you don't use GarageBand for example, you could just delete the app along with a load of sample loops, which are probably taking up a few GB!

That is an excellent suggestion! Thank you for it. I'm running it now on my PB's hard drive and there is a lot of stuff I can remove, even though the drive is only about 60% full.

A veritable chorus of reason!

We expect nothing less!

 

[Rmpl]

Detailed info on what you should do, let me know if you have any questions:

here are a few things you can try:

REPAIR PERMISSIONS: Go to Applications/Disk Utility
Once in Disk Utility, click on the harddrive icon on the left pane, and click Repair Permissions. (You can do it with the step below).

VERIFY / REPAIR DISK:
Take out the gray disk that comes with your computer. Restart your computer while holding on to the "Option" key. Select the CD and hit enter. Go through a few screens until the menu bar on top of the screen appear. Look for Disk Utility under one of the menus. Open Disk Utility. Click on the harddrive icon on the left pane. (Repair permissions if you haven't). Click Repair Disk.

MAKE ROOM
described above.

TRY WITH A NEW USER ACCOUNT
Once you have 15GB of space, create a New User, and see if running apps within that user would crash. If it doesn't then it's only your old user account is messed up. If it still does after doing all the above steps, then I would reinstall the OS. (If you are at this point on a windows machine you would have to have reinstalled the windows two or three times already).

BACKUP DATA & REINSTALL
And if absolutely necessary (apps still crashing when you are runing as the new user), reinstalling OSX is extremely easy, no need to babysit the install (Windows require you to click a few things, wait, click more things, then wait, repeat. Tremendous waste of time to babysit Windows installs). Installing OSX does not need any babysitting; once you click a few things to get the install started, you can take a walk, go somewhere, and when you come back, Mac OS X will be ready for you. If you choose to do this, you need to backup all your files first. In YOUR situation, I would erase the harddrive and do a clean install.

I've tried all of those things except try a new user account and do a OS reinstall. If I need 15gig for a new user account then it might just be better to do a reinstall because I'm going to need to backup either way. Although I am very curious as to whether a new user account would fix things...

Are you kidding? He hasn't tried any of the suggestions in this thread. He refuses to add more RAM or reinstall his operating system. He won't consider a larger hard drive. He simply wants things to work without putting any effort toward maintenance or improvement. You can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. What else is there to do for someone unwilling to make any changes?

I'm confused by this. Are you being serious?

First off, I agree that you shouldn't have to upgrade your computer to make it work better. If you were fine with the performance before, it should be fine now. However, system updates might have made it slower, I'm not sure, and 1 GB is pretty low (I know I wish I had 2).

But anyway, no application is going to magically improve your performance. You need to delete things you don't need. If you can afford it, buy an external hard disk, or a 4 GB flash drive and move as many files as you can that you don't need often to it. Also, if you don't use all of the applications you have installed, a lot of them can take up surprisingly large amounts of space, so you could also try removing some. The only other suggestion I have is to try Monolingual, which can free up a lot of space. Some people say it can cause problems, though, so try at your own risk.

Yeah, I do wish I had more RAM. Every computer I've ever owned, that's the one thing I always seem to need more of. But I can't spend money on it. I'll check out Monolingual and see if it's worth using.

Thank you everyone for your help. Mac users sure like to talk a lot...

 

[Mr Black]

Perhaps one of the 512mb sticks of ram went the way of the DoDo and thats causing your performance hit.

 

[Rmpl]

Perhaps one of the 512mb sticks of ram went the way of the DoDo and thats causing your performance hit.

I guess that's possible but the performance isn't that much worse so I sort of doubt it.

 

[IJ Reilly]

I've tried all of those things except try a new user account and do a OS reinstall. If I need 15gig for a new user account then it might just be better to do a reinstall because I'm going to need to backup either way. Although I am very curious as to whether a new user account would fix things...

They try it, it won't require much hard drive space at all. Fast, easy, no risk. Creating a "virgin" user account is always good troubleshooting method. It won't fix anything, but it can help you isolate the problem -- and save you from needless reinstalls.

 

[26139]

huh?

I've tried all of those things except try a new user account and do a OS reinstall. If I need 15gig for a new user account then it might just be better to do a reinstall because I'm going to need to backup either way. Although I am very curious as to whether a new user account would fix things...

Dude, a new user account doesn't take up 15 gigs and it takes about five minutes to set up.

 

[jsw]

Dude, a new user account doesn't take up 15 gigs and it takes about five minutes to set up.

Actually, it took me 18 seconds, and it takes up less than 50K (at least prior to initial login).

 

[Rmpl]

Dude, a new user account doesn't take up 15 gigs and it takes about five minutes to set up.

Mmmm, ok. That sounds right. I was just going off of what the other guy said. Maybe I read it wrong.