Improve iMac performance

[OrangeCrush]

I've got an iMac that's a couple of years old, and time (along with software) has taken its toll on the speed of my iMac. I've run Onyx, I've downloaded a utility that lets me set time machine to run once a day instead of every hour, but I'm still not happy with some of the slowdowns I get. So, my question is what will give me the best performance bump?:

1 - Clean install of 10.5
2 - Add more RAM (currently I only have the 1GB it came with)
3 - Upgrade to 10.6
4 - Something else I'm not considering

Thanks.

 

[mcgrath383]

i have a 2007 imac just recently upgraded my ram form 2 to 4 gb the improvement was substantial particularly when running windows on the machine so I would suggest a ram upgrade. Although wouldn't by the ram form apple

 

[madog]

A clean install always helps.

If you do the same stuff you used to do with your machine then 1GB Ram should be fine. If your needs and uses have grown over the year then upgrading to 2GB would only help (and it's fairly cheap these days).

It is also could be that the drive is starting to go bad in the machine. Wouldn't be common after only a couple years, but it is always a possibility.

 

[Zortrium]

What seems slower? It's unclear to me if you're saying it's slower than it used to be or just that it's slower than you'd like.

Definitely bump the RAM to 2 gigs (could do 4, but if you're getting by with 1 there's probably no need). Another thing is that if your HD is very full, it can slow down your machine somewhat.

 

[ChrisA]

1 - Clean install of 10.5
2 - Add more RAM (currently I only have the 1GB it came with)
3 - Upgrade to 10.6
4 - Something else I'm not considering

Thanks.

1) Clean install does absolutly nothing. Mac OS in not Windows

2) Yes 1Gb is not enough. Install all the RAM that will fit. This is will haep more then anything else you can do.

4) If you have lots of data and use softwre that reads/writes a lot to the disk such as video or audio editing then putting that data on an fast external disk using a FW800 interface will help.