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iMac RAM boost Effectiveness?

S

shanshor

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 4, 2008
227
82
Hey guys, I have an early '08 24" iMac, with a 320GB HD, 8800 GS, 2.8GHz, and 2GB RAM. iTunes takes about 30 secs to come up and boot up is taking longer than it should. Logging in also takes a good bit for it to load preferences and such (I have no login items)

It is getting just a bit slow for my liking, and I was wondering how much impact an upgrade to 4GB would do (2 < 4).
 
How large is your itunes library?

It should not take that long to come up. even on my 1.8ghz G5 w/ ~300gb of music it only takes like 10 seconds tops. Is your music on an external hard disk?

I would suggest getting something to check the health of your hard disk, scan it for bad sectors, etc. If you make an appointment for the genius bar and take it to an apple store, they may be able to help you as well.

DO NOT "DEFRAG" IT. OS X doesn't need this, ever.

Ram upgrades are always a good idea and since ram is cheap, it certainly can't hurt to do it. I'd suggest www.macsales.com for ram.

Lastly, you may want to repair permissions with disk utility or possibly even reinstall everything from scratch and make a fresh start.

Good luck
 
Well my HD has about 160 GB used up, and my itunes library isn't huge. Not even a thousand songs, it does have a lot of videos though. I have ran disk utility and TechTool Deluxe and everything seems fine
 
shanshor said:
Well my HD has about 160 GB used up, and my itunes library isn't huge. Not even a thousand songs, it does have a lot of videos though. I have ran disk utility and TechTool Deluxe and everything seems fine
Click to expand...

Strange. My Mac is a lot slower and starts iTunes with 12,000 songs in 8 seconds. Start Activity Monitor (it's in the Utilities folder; Command-Shift-U in the Finder, or better use Spotlight), watch your memory usage and see what happens when iTunes gets started. If "free" + "unused" memory together is low, then you should think about more RAM, otherwise it won't help too much. If you have significant amounts of "free" memory left, then you don't need more RAM at all.
 
Try downloading Cocktail, install and run. Go to Pilot, select tasks as indicated in the image attached and click run.

This worked for my MBP. Hope it works for you!
 

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shanshor said:
Hey guys, I have an early '08 24" iMac, with a 320GB HD, 8800 GS, 2.8GHz, and 2GB RAM. iTunes takes about 30 secs to come up and boot up is taking longer than it should. Logging in also takes a good bit for it to load preferences and such (I have no login items)

It is getting just a bit slow for my liking, and I was wondering how much impact an upgrade to 4GB would do (2 < 4).
Click to expand...

Are other applications slow to launch as well? If you have a large iTunes library, and/or if it's stored on a network or external drive, it will take much longer to load.

You might also try rebuilding your iTunes library - yours could have gotten corrupted.

If it happens with every application, you might look into more RAM.
 
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