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VERY slow 2009 imac!

S

stev1212

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 29, 2011
7
0
Hi guys! Im new here so i hope i've posted this in the right section! Basically... i have a 2009 Imac 21.5" 3.06ghz with two problems
1) Time machine: It works fine! BUT! if i click on say google chrome if my time machine is powered down because its been inactive for 40 minutes it takes my mac about 30 seconds to load chrome up (or any application for that matter) and i know the two are related because i can hear time machine spin up when i click the icon. This is VERY annoying because half the time my mac assumes the app has crashed (which it hasnt, its waiting for time machine for some reason) And tries to kill it. What is going on!?

2) Ever since i upgraded to Lion my mac has been SUPER slow! slower than my old single core PC infact! every time i hit expose it takes about 20 seconds to give me a view of all my windows, Scrolling on web pages is painful, Copy and pasting is slower (not unusable though) I've tried repairing permissions and doing the daily, weekly, monthly terminal line to clear my caches etc NO DIFFERENCE! help please?! :(

Replies appreciated!
 
Sounds like there's a couple things going on here.

First, the Time Machine thing. Sounds like the drive is spinning down, then spinning back up when the computer tries to poll the drive. The spin-up takes a few seconds, more for slower drives, and the computer will seem to "pause" while the drive spins up. You can prevent this by going to the Energy Saver control panel and unchecking the option to spin down the hard drives.

The second issue is a little more vague. How much memory is in your machine? What other apps are running all the time (i.e., somethings starting when the machine boots)? More details here would help.
 
xraydoc said:
Sounds like there's a couple things going on here.

First, the Time Machine thing. Sounds like the drive is spinning down, then spinning back up when the computer tries to poll the drive. The spin-up takes a few seconds, more for slower drives, and the computer will seem to "pause" while the drive spins up. You can prevent this by going to the Energy Saver control panel and unchecking the option to spin down the hard drives.

The second issue is a little more vague. How much memory is in your machine? What other apps are running all the time (i.e., somethings starting when the machine boots)? More details here would help.
Click to expand...

It's a 4 gig with a 1TB hard drive, I have tried unchecking the spin down option in energy saver and it doesn't work :( When my machine boots up from cold it loads up itunes, Google chrome, Flexi glass, sophos, and thats it. I NEVER have less than 1gig of RAM Available and my CPU usually has a minimum of 20% still free. To give you an idea of what its like, imagine your exporting a movie using Imovie in HD then trying to use the computer normally while it exports in the background. That slow unresponsiveness is what my imac is like most of the time.
 
I believe I saw this will be fixed in 10.7.2... also things like slowness in getting on the wireless after coming out of sleep. I have had both of these issues with 10.7.1... not using chrome but have seen it with Safari.
 
stev1212 said:
It's a 4 gig with a 1TB hard drive, I have tried unchecking the spin down option in energy saver and it doesn't work :(
Click to expand...

This "feature" has never worked. 10.0-10.7. Your experience is why I hate on the external drives.
 
Not that I have found to work reliably. Others may have a better experience. If I recall it has more to do with the external HD's own power saving modes. OS X can't control that. But even still, my internal HDD's never sleep either even when expressly told in a shell.
 
stev1212 said:
When my machine boots up from cold it loads up itunes, Google chrome, Flexi glass, sophos, and thats it.
Click to expand...
Sophos should be avoided, as it could actually increase your Mac's vulnerability, as described here and here. You don't need any 3rd party antivirus software to protect Mac OS X from malware.
 
I ran the many different panels within Onyx (which is free clean-up utility for SL) and was amazed on how many corrupted files and other things that existed on my iMac. Not too sure if Onyx will work on Lion, but it worked great on my SL machine. re: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx

This utility (to correct permissions to other fixes) might work great on your 2009 iMac / using Lion as well....

.
 
Last edited:
GGJstudios said:
Sophos should be avoided, as it could actually increase your Mac's vulnerability, as described here and here. You don't need any 3rd party antivirus software to protect Mac OS X from malware.
Click to expand...

That guy mentions to avoid Sophos and use VirusBarrier because of root privileges? Laughable. Already burned through VirusBarrier. Those guy's are complete fools. Clam can't be used in enterprise because of free license. And yes, you don't need AV for a Mac unless your legal department requires it.
 
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