osx Mavericks Peformance New Account vs. Old Account

[tonyhes]

Hello,

I have a 27" iMac from approx 2012. It has been upgraded to O/S Maverick.. But not any further.

The performance seems to be very poor, slow to login and show desktop content, lots O spinning beach after.

I have tried:
-Power cycle
-Deleting Caches (With several programs)
-Cleaning desktop etc up.
-pram reset
-login items (4 is all that shows).... This is usless.
-Drive is approx 1/4 used


What I do notice... there are many items in the activity monitor, most of which I cannot really pin down to exactly what they are.... But there are MANY of them... each typically taking 3Mb of memory (not much) but as there are so many... its adding up.

Is there an advanced way to clean up activity monitor items... not just kill them?



HERE IS THE KICKER!

If I create a new user account there is approx. 1/3 of the items in the activity monitor..... and boy does it login fast in comparison!



What is going on here?? Should I be deleting my account and starting over. (I have affection for my username and would like to keep it).

Please help,
Tony H.

 

[hiddenmarkov]

Do you have lots of software installed that puts itself in your on startup lists in your slower profile?

Does this software have auto-features? Like say auto update? If there in start up and doing its auto startup tasks this can bog the system down. You may have no updates to download but the checking for them can still eat up some time.

try to turn off all auto start stuff if motivated to and see if any better on the laggy profile a good start.

Bit lengthy process but if better sans the auto starts you could re-enable application by application to see which one(s) are really killing system startup. then decide how badly you need them to fire up by themselves.

My main profile is a tad slower but...I also tack lots of start ups. My starts off the home network I see some slow down as mac os looks for and connects to NAS based resources it normally see at home. Bit more time on non home network as it won't find the NAS but its not for lack of trying. I don't have cloud access turned on for a few reasons.

 

[Weaselboy]

If I create a new user account there is approx. 1/3 of the items in the activity monitor..... and boy does it login fast in comparison!

Good troubleshooting so far on your part and this is a big clue there is something running under the old account that is slowing things down. Run the app Etrecheck and it will create an anonymized report showing all login and hidden launch items. Post that report up here and we can help you with it.

There are several ways to launch processes other than the login items, and Etrecheck will show them all.

 

[tonyhes]

Took a peek at the software today, learned a little bit. Thank you.
Will test on the trouble machine nest