Bogged Down Computer

[BeeHive]

Hello,

I have 2011 version with a dual-core i7 and 4 GB of Ram. There are two accounts on the machine, one of which is very speedy (as expected). The other account gets the beach ball after every action, and is impossible to do anything on. The account that is very slow does have over 3000 unread emails, and I am wondering if that has anything to do with it, or if we have a virus.

Any help would be appreciated, since this is a massive pain in the neck.
BeeHive
P.S.

 

[Gav Mack]

Boot into recovery HD by holding down option on boot, run disk utility on the OSX boot drive and repair disk permissions. Reboot into safe mode by holding the shift key which takes a long time to start, log into the slow account, then restart again normally and see if it improves it somewhat.

 

[snaky69]

Hello,

I have 2011 version with a dual-core i7 and 4 GB of Ram. There are two accounts on the machine, one of which is very speedy (as expected). The other account gets the beach ball after every action, and is impossible to do anything on. The account that is very slow does have over 3000 unread emails, and I am wondering if that has anything to do with it, or if we have a virus.

Any help would be appreciated, since this is a massive pain in the neck.
BeeHive
P.S.

You don't have a virus, as none exist for OS X"

A lot of unread e-mails should not be causing slowdowns. Something else is at play.

 

[Weaselboy]

Hello,

I have 2011 version with a dual-core i7 and 4 GB of Ram. There are two accounts on the machine, one of which is very speedy (as expected). The other account gets the beach ball after every action, and is impossible to do anything on. The account that is very slow does have over 3000 unread emails, and I am wondering if that has anything to do with it, or if we have a virus.

Any help would be appreciated, since this is a massive pain in the neck.
BeeHive
P.S.

It sounds like you have a startup item of some sort running in the main account that is causing the issue. Do a safe mode boot by holding down the shift key just after the chime at boot and see if the problem exists while in safe mode.

Safe mode bypasses any login/startup items, so if the issue goes away in safe mode, start removing startup or login items until you find the culprit.