21,5" iMac 2012 getting really slow!

[seme332]

Hello People!

My friend has this problem. He has a 2012 21,5" iMac. Mavericks is installed. Just after he bought it the iMac started to slow down which was probably due (at least we thought so) to him installing 3.000 fonts. He reinstalled Mavericks from scratch and hasn't had a problem since but now it is getting slower and slower again and this time it can't be because of any fonts because there are none installed other then the OS X fonts.

It takes about 30 seconds to startup the Mac and sometimes up to a minute to start applications like Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. Also in general it's just slow opening apps and navigating around the finder. Very frustrating.

Thanks for your help!

Sebastian

 

[Weaselboy]

When this is happening, start Activity Monitor from /Applications/Utilities and look in the CPU tab, then sort by % and see if anything is running there that is chewing up CPU cycles slowing things down.

 

[seme332]

Booting Problems

So I think I need to correct this a little: My friend told me that the Mac itself is working fine, fast and fluid but his problem is the Booting process (the Apple Logo and the wheel). His Mac takes around 45-60 Seconds booting up (he has a HDD as a Drive). Is this normal? We chatted with Apple Support yesterday and they told me it was normal but also suggested to delete the cache folder in the library. I did this but it didn't really help.

Also, shutting the computer down takes pretty long, too. Up to 30 seconds or more actually. I don't know if all this is considered normal but I know that my personal iMac is shutting down much faster then his (and I have a HDD as well).

Thanks for your help!

 

[ouimetnick]

Pretty much all new versions of OSX after OSX 10.6 are slow with booting and shutdown.

 

[Weaselboy]

So I think I need to correct this a little: My friend told me that the Mac itself is working fine, fast and fluid but his problem is the Booting process (the Apple Logo and the wheel). His Mac takes around 45-60 Seconds booting up (he has a HDD as a Drive). Is this normal? We chatted with Apple Support yesterday and they told me it was normal but also suggested to delete the cache folder in the library. I did this but it didn't really help.

Also, shutting the computer down takes pretty long, too. Up to 30 seconds or more actually. I don't know if all this is considered normal but I know that my personal iMac is shutting down much faster then his (and I have a HDD as well).

Thanks for your help!

That sounds a little slow, but not bad. You might have him do a command-r boot to the recovery utility and from there use Disk Utility to do a repair disk to make sure nothing is going on with his drive.

Also, go to System Preferences and in the Startup Disk pane make sure the correct internal disk is selected as the boot drive. If that is not picked the system will search around for other boot sources and that will slow things down.