Major General Slowdown

[sikkinixx]

My grandma's old school iMac (although it is running OS X) is really slow. I mean, it's an old machine os it is kind of expected but she tells me has seems to get slower every day and things arent loading so well, and its freezing up now and again. Being the grandson with an Apple as well, I have to fix it. I am thinking to repair the permissions, etc. Maybe clear out some of the stuff she doesn't use to free up some HDD space (helps with windows) and make sure she doesn't have 1000 things runnning at once.

Anything else I should pick around with to help get it running a bit better again?


Thanks!

 

[joeops57]

Check the activity monitor to see if there's anything hogging up a lot of system resources. Might narrow down a "culprit'. Other than that, the stuff you suggested are good. Not having enough hard drive space is a cause for system slow down.

~Joe

 

[garfield2002]

If the iMac is THAT old you should take the time to back up her files and reformat it. This will certainly give you the biggest speed boost. Plus it will make you look REALLY good when the old HD eventually fails and you have backups of all her most important files.

 

[sikkinixx]

thanks

I gave it a go, seems to be working a bit better. Its a Special edition 400mhz G3 slot loading CRT iMac! Its...s...o... ..s....l......o....w.....!!

 

[disconap]

Ok, two questions--how much RAM does it have, and what version of OSX is it running? We have the same imac here in the office, and it runs a lot better with 10.3 than it did with 10.2, provided you have enough RAM (we're running ours at 684). It's slow compared to an intel mac, but it's pretty damn fast overall...

 

[funkychunkz]

It's slow compared to an intel mac, but it's pretty damn fast overall...

*Eyebrow raises*

Things to delete and run: Cron scripts, delete all logs, delete caches (user,system,deep-system probably not necessary) update prebindings if she has sub-panther running, delete extra languages (monolingual), delete indexes, do permissions repair just in case, AND finish it off nice and square safe boot (fsck) and a reboot into normal mode.

That's just basic, if there are no particular problems or culprits. While your there do a physical clean up too. A cleaned keyboard and mouse fell nice. Elder ladies like that sorta thing. Tidiness. Some visual settings can be tweaked to improve preformance, or just make it feel faster.