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420benz

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 11, 2012
634
18
My mac is about 5 years old and i never turn it off. I am sure there is so much crap on it that is making it very slow. Receintly the spinning ball is apeiring more often. What can i do to clean up alot of the un-needed crap on this machine?Thanks
 
Another question (there's so many :D )
How much free space is available on your hard drive?

Mac os x 10.7.5 Lion
Memory 4GB
Lots of memory left. This machine is only used to surf and wife to use Facebook.
 
Do tell us what Mac model you have.
Best is to go to the Apple menu, then About this Mac, and click on More Info button, and click on System Report.
That will open your System Information.
In the Hardware Overview, what is the listed for Model Identifier?
I expect that you have a Mac that is 5 or 6 years old. If you have the original hard drive, then noticeable slowdowns may be symptoms of a failing hard drive.
 
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Do tell us what Mac model you have.
Best is to go to the Apple menu, then About this Mac, and click on More Info button, and click on System Report.
That will open your System Information.
In the Hardware Overview, what is the listed for Model Identifier?
I expect that you have a Mac that is 5 or 6 years old. If you have the original hard drive, then noticeable slowdowns may be symptoms of a failing hard drive.

imac 12,1

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac12,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.5 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Boot ROM Version: IM121.0047.B1E
SMC Version (system): 1.71f22
Serial Number (system): C02H3LDDDHJF
Hardware UUID: 7F9C29F3-3854-5976-BACF-DD98060787B7
 
Beach balls are generally caused by 3 things.

1, cluttered os
2, spotlight indexing on top of usual usage
3, I/o access delays.

If you want to pep your machine up a fresh install will do the trick.

If you want to get the best performance boost then increase the ram to 8gb and slap a cheap ssd in there.
 
Beach balls are generally caused by 3 things.

1, cluttered os
2, spotlight indexing on top of usual usage
3, I/o access delays.

If you want to pep your machine up a fresh install will do the trick.

If you want to get the best performance boost then increase the ram to 8gb and slap a cheap ssd in there.
What do you mean by (A fresh install? ).
 
Check the article at http://scsc-online.com in their how-to section about hard drive problems. They have sections in there about problems that act like hard drive problems that aren't. The symptoms you're describing are similar to hard drive problems but that doesn't mean that's what they are.

One of the things that I've noticed is that a lot of websites have become downright abusive, loading tons of ads and dynamic content. They can peg your RAM and CPU, cause swaps, and make the system crawl.

If the problem seems to happen at random it may be the drive or mds indexing. If you connect and disconnect external drives, then it's almost certainly mds indexing.
 
Also, your mid-2011 iMac can be upgraded to as much as 32GB RAM installed.
If it is a RAM issue, then even doubling to 8GB, which would be 2 minute-simple, can make a world of difference, if that's all you need.
Your admitted use, however, should still be fine with only the 4GB that you have now.
#3 in Gav2k items (I/O access delays) can also point to hard drive issues.

Here's what *I* would do for a fresh install, particularly with 4 years of likely cruft in the the system:
Backup the hard drive to an external storage.
boot to your Recovery partition, erase your internal hard drive using Disk Utility, then reinstall Lion. That's a "fresh install"
You would reboot, then the new user setup will give you the choice to migrate data and apps from another drive. You would choose to do that, with your backed up volume as the source. Your fresh system will migrate everything over. It will take some time - maybe an hour or so. When that is complete, you will be back to your old system, with a "pruned" system (old caches, etc, will be gone, which is as it should be :D ) Your desktop, your pictures, etc, should all be as it was before you started.
Might be a wasted effort, if the problem is actually a failing hard drive.
 
Yes I have but still very slow.

I had a slowness problem on my Macbook Pro and was advised to check if it might be a memory problem (as in too little RAM). If you open Activity Monitor (in the dock, probably), and select the Memory tab at the top, you can see at the bottom how much memory you have (4 gb) and how much is being used. At the bottom where it shows Swap used, if it isn't zero that may be part of your slowness issue.
 
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