OSX Running Slow - How best to speed up?

[BadboyHouse]

My Mac has been running slow-ish since it was running OSX Mountain Lion and this has continued since upgrading to OSX Mavericks when it came out.

The Mac is a late 2011 Core i5 with 4GB RAM.

Booting up to the user select screen is pretty quick - it's after logging in that it's slow. It takes a good few minutes from the dock appearing to actually being able to click on a dock item (e.g. iTunes, iPhoto, Safari) and it actually load. The dock icon bounces up and down for a minute or so first.

Once it's up and running and apps have loaded it's fine everything runs quick.

With Windows you would typically format the hard drive and reinstall the o/s after a few years when it started to slow down - does the same process apply to OSX? I'm anticipating not - but was wondering what the recommended steps are when this sort of slowness creeps in. Are there some system cleanup best practices that perhaps need doing?

I only use the Mac for iTunes and iPhoto along with a small amount of Excel files. The iTunes and iPhoto libraries are quite large but there's 350GB free disk space.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Bear]

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Once it's up and running and apps have loaded it's fine everything runs quick.
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This is the key to your time issue. More RAM would probably help. Getting an SSD in a thunderbolt enclosure to use as you system disk would also help.