Some advice on optimising/saving my iMac.

[chris78cpr]

Hey all,

I've been a long time lurker on here and finally decided to register and get involved as i do need some advice.

I have a 20" iMac Intel, it's around 5 years old, white plastic case with 2GB ram and a 250GB HDD and running 10.4. It's nothing special now and was working reasonably well up until around 4-5 months ago. Since then it's become very sluggish, takes an age to even open up firefox, has turned itunes into a struggle and photoshop is now just a nightmare. Previously it ran all three of these simultaneously without too much issue. While i don't expect it to handle 100 5D2 RAW files, i'd still hope it could play some music and edit a few photos while having a browser open, like it used to.

The only thing that i have changed on the computer around the time it went very slow was i moved the 100GB itunes library off the internal drive and onto a portable bus powered 160GB Lacie drive. I could understand that having the drive connected it might slow things down but even when disconnected the whole computer is now very slow and very sluggish.

Can anyone suggest something i can do to potentially bring it back to it's previous state? I know this is a very vauge explanation but i'm hoping one of you guys will have a tip at least that may help.

The only thing i can think of is to wipe the computer and do a fresh install from the recovery disk but i'm hoping there is an easier and quicker solution.

Again sorry to be very vauge, if anymore info is needed then please ask and i'll try my best to put it accross!

Thanks,

Chris

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Use Activity Monitor, as shown below, at various times during your usage and report back CPU and RAM usage.

______________________________________________________
Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.
Also check the "System Memory" tab to see what your "Page ins:", "Page outs:" and "Swap used:" are.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example

Further reading:

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
Making The Most of Activity Monitor
What Is Activity Monitor (or How to Take Your Mac's Pulse)​

______________________________________________________​

 

[chris78cpr]

Just opened the Activity Monitor (a task it's self took 60-90 seconds with spinning rainbow wheel making an appearance)

Now it's open, for example opening firefox the CPU usage shot up to 19%.

Restoring 5 tabs after the rainbow wheel stops, it shoots up to 30% odd and i get an "unresponsive script warning" from firefox. CPU usage hits 60% at one point and while loading the tabs goes between 20-58%.

If i click a tab with facebook open and reload the homepage the CPU usage shoots up to 59% and is not fluttering between 15%-50% again.

Something there doesn't seem correct?

Chris

----------

Also checking the System Memory tab,

It is saying my free memory is 840mb. VM size is 7.46GB and the Pageins/out are 85071/0 what ever that means.

Chris