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Slow iMac G4 1.25ghz

J

jbleeg

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 7, 2009
2
0
San Jose CA
I have a 20" lampshade iMac that in recent months seems to be running slow in certain applications. Specifically, iMove 6 is showing signs of judder, skipped frames, spinning beach balls, trouble with music intergration. Also, in iPhoto 6, after I hook up my camera by usb to load pics, everything just sits for almost 5 minutes before it will finally copy the pics over to the hd. Once the pictures start to copy, they go fairly quickly. It is just not doing anything for those 5 minutes. Not sure these two issues are related.


The computer has 2 gig of ram, 89 gig hd free of the 292 total. I have run Onyx automated cleaning which repairs permissions, etc.; trashed iMovie and iPhoto prefs, emptied trash. None of these measures seem to help.

I think my problem is a software issue, maybe a virus?? and really don't know what other steps to take. This has been a great computer and really don't want to give up on it yet. Any suggestions
Jerry
 
what os are you running , as i had the same problem when i installed leopard on my eMac , which is also a g4 but with 1.42 mhz , at first it seemed faster but after a couple weeks i noticed a decline in speed , so i startet to repair with onyx and tried every script i could find to improve speed , but at the end i started to disable the goodies of leopard and got it faster, but i realised with all the disabling to get it faster i had basically cut back the leopard to a tiger which only looked as a leopard and so i installed tiger and i`m happy since

just example leopard took also about 10 min to shift a 1.4gb film to the external hd because it did the same waiting for a couple minutes , maybe it was waiting for the file to copy itself by some kind of magic, and only when it realising that there is no magic around it started working
with tiger it takes not even half that time now ,its klick and the file gets copied
 
flopticalcube said:
Its not a virus. Sounds like the HD may be on the way out. Run the Apple Hardware Test on you HD from the restore CDs.
Click to expand...

I agree with this, those are tasks that read/write a lot to the HD, so if it is taking longer than normal, it may be the problem.
 
Machampster, thanks for your reply. I am using Tiger (10.4)and have been since around the time Tiger came out. Previous to that I was on Panther as originally equiped. You video file transfer problem on Lepord sounds like a similar situation to my iPhoto picture transfer problem. It just sits there with no activity, as if waiting for some other imput, until 5 minutes later it finally starts the transfer.
I have run all the scripts I know of.

Last night I reinstalled Tiger by accident. I was going to try testing the HD thru the Tiger install disks, but I never was able to figure out how to access the utilities on the DVD install disk. I could not eject the install disks and had to proceed with the OS install and subsequent updates. Its all working now, but I need to test for those problems I had. Also another person said it sounds like the HD may be going south. I doubt it, because I did upgrade it about 3 years ago.

I am going to run a ToolTech hardware diagnostic again, and will let you know the result.
Jerry
 
flopticalcube said:
3 years is a about an average life for a Mac HD. Its most probably your HD.
Click to expand...


ok i wont rule out the harddrive but i will not say its the most likely source
and i can explain why, because he said the iMac is waiting 5 minutes before doing anything but once it has startet to do something it moves files quickly on the harddrive, so to me it soulds more like a software then a hardware problem ,, but to make sure just check the harddrive for bad sectors and things like that
 
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