boot camp making my imac super slow

[mirariwake]

I installed windows 7 with bootcamp and it is making my imac really slow. I only have to use windows for one application so I allotted only 20 gb for the partition. I'm not sure if that could be a reason why but when I start to use osx, its super slow and I keep getting the beach ball. I didn't use a legit copy of windows, I just installed windows 7 through a recover disc that came with one of my pc's

Anyone know what could be causing this issue?

 

[MrCheeto]

How much free space do you have on your OS X partition?

 

[mirariwake]

900 gb free space

 

[MrCheeto]

Well...that rules out the chance that it's the amount of free space.

It could, however, be that it's rewriting old deleted data. In order to clear old deleted data and thus speed up writes to the drive, you should go to Disk Utility, then click the Mac partition and click Erase at the top list next to First Aid, then click Erase Free Space. This won't destroy any of your data, just the deleted artifacts.

 

[mirariwake]

I also tried installing bootcamp and using the same method, the recovery disk from my pc and it was doing the same thing also.

I was installing it on a brand new imac so the space was basically never used. Do you still think it could be the artifacts? Just asking because clearing the free space will take 4 hours....

 

[MrCheeto]

I was installing it on a brand new imac so the space was basically never used. Do you still think it could be the artifacts?

If it's new, then it's newly formatted, so no.

 

[mirariwake]

Since its not a real version of windows do you think it could be the recovery disk that I'm using?

 

[MrCheeto]

I personally don't see how it's possible that the version of Windows used would have anything to do with OS X's performance.

 

[Quad5Ny]

Don't do what MrCheeto said, it doesn't sound like he knows how mechanical HD's work. Doing that will just waste your time. (Sorry Cheeto, but it's true).

On hard drives things are never deleted, they are just marked as free for re-use. Because of this HFS+ (OS X's file system) keeps a Free Space Bitmap that tracks all free space, zeroing all the Free Space will do nothing for speed.

Partitions can get fragmented over a period of time though, if this was this case something like iDefrag would help consolidate the fragmented files and increase speed a bit. But your computer is new and you have 900GB free space, so this is not the case.

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As for a Boot Camp partition slowing down OS X, that's not possible. It's like saying a partition containing Music is slowing down your computer.

When you partitioned your mechanical drive you told it to update the partition map and mark off 20GB at the end of the drive to create a new partition. This partition is completely separate from OS X and would not effect its 'speed' in any way.

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You should make a new thread in the Mac OS X or Mac OS X 10.7 Lion section of the forums and list; exactly what computer, what you have installed, your boot time and what your doing when your getting beach balls.

Note: Apple recalled Certain 1TB Hard Drives, please go here to see if yours was part of that recall - http://www.apple.com/support/imac-harddrive/

 

[MrCheeto]

Don't do what MrCheeto said, it doesn't sound like he knows how mechanical HD's work.

Uhuh...

As you said, the information isn't actually deleted, it's just marked as deleted by the front-end.

So why would zeroing the free space do anything? Because time is wasted on erasing the data before rewriting it. It's quicker to write on a clean sheet of paper than it is to simply strike out the word and later erase it so that you can re-use the paper.

As well, I told him not to do it. If you read, after I realized the drive was new, it was made clear that that couldn't be the issue.

Manually defragmenting does nothing considering Macs do this constantly...