iMac Slowing Down

[BachandBeer]

I've got a late 2013 IMac that has started slowing down, with "wheel of death" popping up too often. What steps should I take to speed it up? Or is it time to upgrade? If so, should I hang on until the release of Apple's own CPU's that I heard were coming in the next year or so?

thanks much,

BachandBeer

 

[Glmnet1]

What kind of storage does it have?

 

[BachandBeer]

What kind of storage does it have?

I've got a 1 Gigabite hard drive, of which 830 MB are free. I have 8 GB RAM.
[doublepost=1522956814][/doublepost]BTW, I found a helpful Popular Science article on speeding up my iMac from August 22, 2017. https://www.popsci.com/macos-tweaks-improve-performance There are more if you google Speed up iMac.

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

Consider using an SSD as an external drive connected via USB3. Clone the operating system etc to it using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, and it will be bootable. Into System Preferences and select as the Boot Drive by highlighting. You will get a great speed increase over the slow old platter drive, which can then be used for backups.

 

[padams35]

I've got a 1 Gigabite hard drive, of which 830 MB are free. I have 8 GB RAM.

... I'm assuming you meant to say you had a 1TB hard drive with 830 GB free. If you truly only have 830 MB free then you are in desperate need of freeing up hard drive space. MacOS really wants something like 20GB of free space.


Otherwise the easy fix is switching to an SSD. That's the one-size-fits-all solution that solves everything from HDD corruption to Drop Box file syncing slowdowns.

The hard fix is to search for and uninstall whatever background software is consume a disproportionate share of a limiting resource (Ram, CPU, drive I/O). A popular starting point is https://etrecheck.com/ which has a pretty good system report aggregator that can find obvious problems.

 

[Cool Pup]

Definitely hard drive space related if you only have 830 MB free. I always leave at least 30 GB space open no matter what hard drive, sometimes as much as 80 because MacOS operates terribly without a wide net of free space.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:
nambu "has the answer" for you in reply 4 above.

Get an EXTERNAL USB3 SSD, plug it in and then set it up to be the boot drive.
A drive like this would do fine:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00ZTRY532?tag=delt-20
250gb or 500gb is "all you need".

Put the OS, apps, and your home folder on the SSD.
BUT
Leave the "large libraries" of movies, music and pics on the internal drive (they don't need speed).
Keep the SSD booter "lean and clean".

You can even velcro a small boot SSD to the back of the iMac's stand. It will be up-and-out-of-the-way. You won't even notice it's there.

Do this, and I predict you will become a very happy man with the results.
Save this thread and come back with your impressions.