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The Buzzard

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 26, 2008
4
0
Auckland
Hi. I've got an iMac 20" Intel Core Duo 2Ghz with 1Gb memory. I've had this for close to 3 years now and really love it. It converted me to all that is Apple!. Unfortunately it has recently started to run really slowly. A friend recently suggested that this was because the hard drive is close to full (only about 15Gb of about 150Gb are free. Is this likely to be the problem or is it more likely a memory or, dare I say it, 'virus' problem. Any advice would be greatly appreciated...

Cheers :)
 

The Buzzard

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 26, 2008
4
0
Auckland
Nice word - 'Slowyness'! ;)

The sort where it takes an age for applications to open, the sort where I click on the shortcut to launch widgets and it takes about 1 minute for them to load. Just 'PC' type slowness that I used to get with viruses. Yuk!
 

SnowLeopard2008

macrumors 604
Jul 4, 2008
6,772
17
Silicon Valley
Your HDD is tiptoeing the edge. You should have 15% of your total HDD size unused. Just back up your data and do a fresh reinstall to clear up any junk. Onyx is a program that removes caches, and clears up junk on the mac. It optimizes and customizes certain settings to make it run faster. It's worth a shot before a reinstall.

A permanent solution is upgrading the ram and/or HDD. Ram is easy I think.. but HDD is not easy, but doable. I used to have 1GB of ram and it was slow... Office took like 1 minute to load. Now that I have 4GB (check my signature) its much faster, not to mention it took a few minutes and half a benjamin ($50) to do.
 

The Buzzard

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 26, 2008
4
0
Auckland
Your HDD is tiptoeing the edge. You should have 15% of your total HDD size unused. Just back up your data and do a fresh reinstall to clear up any junk.

Thanks for the advice. At the risk of sounding like a real newbie, what is the process for doing a reinstall so that I don't have to reload all the important things that I want retained on the hard drive. Would it be enough to delete the apps that I don't use and various movie and audio files that are saved elsewhere or is there a better approach?

Cheers
 

gusious

macrumors 65816
Dec 2, 2007
1,277
2
Greece
You can always do an archive install. And yes, of course you should delete everything that you don't use. From apps to files and folders.

But check the thing with the RAM. That will boost you up!
 

Toby Goodbar

macrumors 6502
Sep 8, 2006
400
0
ram is always a help, but you don't need it for this problem. i'm pretty sure i know what you are experiencing. someone mentioned about 15% hd space should be clear and thats true, except that it will gradually drop below that. idk if its a virtual memory thing or what but after a few hours or few days depending how full you are you will notice it really slows up until you reboot and then its fine for awhile. and if you pay attention to your HD free space when you freshly boot up and look at it when you start getting that slowness or haha "slowlyness", you'll notice its free space has dropped by the gigs.

its time to go to town and delete delete delete, onyx won't clear up a significant amount... its only a small help. OR get a new HD. my addiction is movies, porn, music, and music videos. i added some new drives and store media seperately and put my os on a 110gb HD. being that it was a newer HD it has faster speeds and i don't worry about the "virtual memory" problem like i did when my os was on the 30gb. if you do this, get carbon copy cloner its free fast and fantastic!
 

JediMeister

macrumors 68040
Oct 9, 2008
3,263
5
Hey Buzzard, here are the different install options for Mac OS X: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1545
For instructions on how to actually do an archive and install, read over http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1710
Since you mentioned that you're at about 10% or less of HD space you may not be able to do the preserving users and network settings option. If you can back up your home folder (in Macintosh HD/Users) to an external hard drive, do so, and then do an erase & install. You'll have to reinstall non-Apple loaded applications and run updates again but once you're done with the reinstall process, you can then drag files back over from the drive into your new user folder. Just so there aren't any permissions issues, you should probably name your reestablished user account with the same shortname as your existing account.
 
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