iMac running slow with OS X Lion

[Barry4160]

Help.. Im having a lot of trouble with mi iMac running extremely slow from boot up with hardly any applications running. I have 12GB of RAM installed and would expect a bit more sped in performance. Activity monitor shows 9.5GB of wired RAM leaving little free and inactive RAM to use and I have absolutely no Idea what wired RAM is.

Anyone have any idea??

Thanks for any help..

 

[GimmeSlack12]

Help.. Im having a lot of trouble with mi iMac running extremely slow from boot up with hardly any applications running. I have 12GB of RAM installed and would expect a bit more sped in performance. Activity monitor shows 9.5GB of wired RAM leaving little free and inactive RAM to use and I have absolutely no Idea what wired RAM is.

Anyone have any idea??

Thanks for any help..

Take a screenshot sorted by the Real Memory Column. That will tell you where your memory is going. You have plenty of RAM available and no page outs, so I'm not totally sure it's a RAM problem. Are you getting beach balls often? You could be looking at a hard drive that is very close to dead. I'd make sure you have a backup of important files.

You change anything recently? Install something?

 

[Barry4160]

Beachballs all the time. Nothing new installed. Have had to reinstall OS twice now and restore from time machine in the last 6 months. Seems to work well for a month or 2 and then get gradually gets worse and worse until it reaches the point where it wont even boot up. Not good.

If its the hard disk how easy/expensive is it to get that replaced??

Thanks for your help...

 

[GimmeSlack12]

Beachballs all the time. Nothing new installed. Have had to reinstall OS twice now and restore from time machine in the last 6 months. Seems to work well for a month or 2 and then get gradually gets worse and worse until it reaches the point where it wont even boot up. Not good.

If its the hard disk how easy/expensive is it to get that replaced??

Thanks for your help...

Yeah, you're hard drive is very much likely the cause of this. A temporary fix for this is to restore your internal drive onto an external and boot from that.

As for fixing it, if you're Mac is under warranty then Apple will take care of it for you at the nearest Apple store. If it is not, then they'll still take care of it for probably about $200 which is a semi-rip cause they'll charge you a crapload for the original drive that the Mac came with. This is unfortunate because this is a good opportunity to upgrade to a much bigger drive or SSD!. If you're not under warranty then I'd try to find a non-Apple store that'll work on it and put in whatever drive you want.

Now if you're technically inclined then I suggest opening your iMac and replacing your drive yourself. It isn't as hard as you might think, but there are one or two pitfalls that take some patience. I have a 2008 iMac that I've done this with and can easily walk you through that, but not sure about 27" iMacs.