My relatively new iMac is going slow - NOT a memory problem!

[momech]

Hi!

Firstly my stats. I'm using an iMac 2.8 GHz and running OSX 10.5.8. Plenty of memory - 135GB on the HD, ca 1340mb of RAM

Just recently my Mac has started running very slow. There's a lot of lagging, spinning beach-ball... Working in Photoshop is becoming a pain, simple things such as switching tools cause long delays. If I'm listening to streaming music whilst working in Photoshop sometimes the music will "stutter", as if there were memory problems, but as I say I have plenty of memory. I bought the Mac less than a year ago!

Some ideas I have: Recently my printer died so I bought an HP wireless Photosmart c6380 All-in-One. Got it all set up and working fine. I also have an HP Scanjet scanner previously installed (usually use it in Photoshop through TWAIN) and at first I could use both but all of a sudden I'm having problems, my Mac can't find the Scanjet. I wonder if there could be a connection between the newly-installed HP software and my suddenly slow Mac? Think I read somewhere that there were issues between certain HP software and OSX?

I notice in Monitor that I have 1 permanently stuck process (but I don't know what). Could that be of significance?

Have repaired permissions, and run Script Maintainance. No improvements.

I'm no Mac expert by far so I don't really know what else to try... I'd be very gratefull for any tips you guys have

Thanks in advance!

 

[BlueRevolution]

I notice in Monitor that I have 1 permanently stuck process (but I don't know what). Could that be of significance?

How do you mean "stuck"? You've restarted, I assume?

 

[iPhone 62S]

I'm having the same problem actually, on a 2.4GHz with 2GB RAM.

Repaired permissions and reboooted yesterday so I'm waiting to see if it's improved.

I don't have any processes taking up loads of power, though, and I haven't installed dodgy pirated software on it or anything.

 

[momech]

Thanks, BlueRevolution, for your reply.

I mean everytime I open Monitor the list in "Processes" shows "1 stuck" listed, see screenshot. Don't know if it's significant or not and don't know how to find out. Restarting makes no difference, it's been there as long as I've been checking, 4 days or so.

 

[BlueRevolution]

That's normal. I have 4 stuck right now, with a total of 433 processes.

All of your resource use looks just fine to me. Try creating a new user account. Does stuff run properly there?

 

[momech]

Oh, thanks. Good to know. Will try a new user account and reply when I have tested it

 

[arjen92]

I'm not saying it is, but when you've tried everything and it still isn't faster it might be your hard drive. I had a hard drive failure after a year and some months, the drive crashed. But when it still worked, the iMac was extremely slow. So I'm not saying this is the reason cause there are a lot of other reasons, but it could be a hard drive failure.