Q: PLease advise on increasing the speed of my iMac 2008. It is running slowly and accesses the HDD a lot. Perhaps re-installation? Thanks.

There are a number of things you may be able to check to optimize your iMac's performance.

1) Hard drive space -- you really need roughly 25% open space on your hard drive to optimize seek and write times for data

2) More RAM, which your iMac can probably go up to 16 GB, but at least 8. If it access the drive a lot, then it is probably writing much to that as swaps in memory, which is a good indicator you are lean on the RAM use. The more Mavericks can suspend into cache in RAM, the faster everything will be once it loads in.

3) Do you have a lot of applications open at one time? Limiting the number of open apps will help keep your memory usage from being over-burdened.

Hope this helps!

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.

Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar.

Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then try the action that you're having trouble with again. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message (command-V).

When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.

Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

You probably can't speed it up.

I have a mid-2008 iMac, a little earlier than yours (2.8ghz Core 2 duo, 500gig drive), and it's maxed out at 4 gigs of ram. From the Apple memory specs page, yours would have to be an early 2009 model before you could go up to 8 gigs:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3011?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

I installed Maverics 10.9.0 and it made my computer unusable. Everything just crawled along, from opening apps to opening folders, so I went back to 10.8.5. It's still crawling, but faster than with Mavericks.

I thought about trying it again, with the 10.9.2 release this time, to see if it's gotten any faster, but I've resigned myself to the fact that I (and you) have dinosaurs, and nothing is likely to make them young again. I'll keep using it for now, but I'm planning on buying a new iMac when the next upgrade comes out. Maybe by then the SSD drives will have gotten less expensive.

After all, it is a 6 year old computer now, isn’t it?

Realistically, the i3 and up processors are the ones that run Mavericks optimally.

Although, I have a 3.33 GHz Core 2 Duo machine here at work, and it works fine, but with 16 GB of memory.

Good luck.