Mac slowdown--what maintenance to do?

[alainr]

i have had my imac for almost 2 years--came from a pc.
It seems to be slowing down. The spinning ball stays on the screen for a while.

Shld i take it in to the mac store before my service contract is up? or what shld i do? i have read on this forum that you don't defrag a mac.

I emptied my trash. does that really help?

I read about OnyX 2.1.4 on this site. Shld i download it? what exactly does it do? i read the description, but......

I use vmfusionware for quicken. i don't have snow leopard.

 

[forcefieldkid]

If youve never repaired permissions in 2 years Id suggest you start there and do it a few times.

Applications>Utilities>Disc Utility

Select your harddrive and hit repair permissions. Then verify, and repair again. Do this till it clears. Should speed things up for a start. if youre still having speed problems after that, then start thinking about things like onyx.

 

[JediMeister]

I also suggest taking inventory of what applications you have installed on the system. Do any run in the background? Any set as startup/login items? Have all the updates for your OS/applications you use on a regular basis been installed?

 

[GGJstudios]

You can use Activity Monitor to see what's running and using resources. Make sure you don't have any apps running that you didn't expect to run. Also, how much RAM do you have? For most users, there's a big difference in performance between 2GB and 4GB RAM, for example.