iMac is too slow & My EtreCheck Report

In short your iMac is a bit of a mess and it looks like you bought a base model 21.5" iMac which has a glacially slow 5400 RPM HD. Macs should NEVER EVER EVER have the following types of third party apps installed on them.

• Cleaning apps
• Antivirus apps
• Security apps
• VPN apps
• Maintenance apps

CMM is considered one of the worst and most experienced users on these forums consider it malware. PLEASE locate the developers (MacPaw) uninstall instructions and please uninstall and then post a fresh EtreCheck report. If you have any other of the types of apps installed in the list above, please uninstall them ASAP.

Macs do not require nor do the benefit in ANY way by having those types of apps installed. What these apps do is slow down your Mac (which is slow enough as it is), make Mac OS appear unstable and buggy. They do NOTHING that Mac OS cannot do on it's own. To keep Mac OS fast and secure simply keep it up-to-date and restart your iMac about 1x per week.

Also, you are operating the computer without any type of backup it appears, this is a HUGE mistake and a 150% guarantee you will lose data which could be a catastrophe for you. At the very least you should be using Time Machine which is included in Mac OS. If you are not familiar with Time Machine please click Back up your Mac with Time Machine. This only requires that you have an External Hard Disk, many experienced users prefer the OWC (www.macsales.com) Mercury Elite Pro series fo External Hard Disks.

After you have rid your computer of CMM and verified you have (create and read a new EtreCheck report after the uninstall) then the next step is to use an external SSD to speed up your Mac. In short what you would be doing is replacing the internal HD and using the external SSD as your startup drive. DO NOT think of using the putting Time Machine and your new external SSD install on the same external SSD. This would completely erase why you backup in the first place, use an external HD for Time Machine and a separate external SSD for your internal HD's replacement. You can learn how to install the external SSD by clicking Setup external SSD as startup drive and the drive I'd recommend is a https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-envoy-pro-sx.

Now for the news I'm sure you don't want to hear, in your case what I would do is to replace your 2017 21.5" iMac with a brand new iMac. These are dramatically faster than what you own. Also, an external SSD will cost at least $250, money you could use towards getting a current Mac. I suspect your 2017 will be declared obsolete by Apple sometime in 2024 when they announce the next release of Mac OS. That is a hunch based on the history of what Apple has done in the past. When they declare a machine obsolete that means parts become extremely difficult to find and replace.

If the cost of replacement is a problem, you have LOTS of options available to you, please don't feel you can only use an iMac, any current Mac will work including a Mac Mini, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Studio etc. If you cannot afford to all the cash up front, Apple offers 12 month same as cash using ApplePay, something to consider! Also, if new Macs are too expensive, consider an Apple Refurbished Mac. Apple Refurbished devices are great, they are identical to a new machine, have the same warranty as new, are eligible for AppleCare and finally can save hundreds of $$ and you can also use ApplePay to get the same financing as mentioned above. In short an Apple Refurb has no downside.

disk0 - APPLE HDD HTS541010A9E632 1.00 TB (Mechanical - 5400 RPM)

Internal SATA 3 Gigabit Serial ATA

This slow mechanical drive is very likely dragging down the performance of your system.

Your iMac has both USB-C (Thunderbolt 3) and USB-A (USB 3.0) ports, which means that many modern external SSDs – at various price and speed levels – are compatible with your system. Getting an external SSD, and using that SSD as your startup drive, could help a lot.

Virtual Memory Information:

Physical RAM: 8 GB

Free RAM: 160 MB

Used RAM: 5.37 GB

Cached files: 2.47 GB

Available RAM: 2.63 GB

Swap Used: 7 MB

At the time you generate the report, you were using 5.37 GB of your 8 GB of RAM.

2.63 GB of RAM was available "on-demand". The system was using 2.47 GB of the 2.63 GB to cache files. If the system needed to read those files again before it needed the RAM, that would speed things up by letting the Mac skip waiting on the disk. If the system needed the RAM first, it would just throw away he cached information and hand over the RAM, since the cached information could always be re-read (slowly) from disk. There was 0.16 GB that was completely unused; it wasn't doing anything but sitting there, waiting to be used.

The Swap Used was 7 MB (0.007 GB). This suggests that at some point, your Mac tried to use slightly more RAM than it actually had, and simulated the extra RAM by using s-l-o-w storage on the disk.

I am guessing that if you watched the Memory Pressure graph in the Activity Monitor, while running normal things, you'd see Green (indicating that you have enough RAM for what you're doing).

If you did see lots of Reds and Yellows, that Mac can take up to 32 GB of RAM (actual limit – the official limit is 16 GB). But the RAM slots are sealed in, and paying a repair shop to do the dicey work of opening and resealing the Mac is something you might want to avoid if you don't actually need the RAM.

rkaufmann87 wrote:

Also, an external SSD will cost at least $250, money you could use towards getting a current Mac

These days, there are external SSDs that cost less than that.

I paid ~$60 for a 1 TB Crucial X9 Pro SSD (exFAT version – reformatted it myself) not long ago. That must have been a sale price, since I see that the same SSD is currently going for $85 at B&H Photo Video and at Amazon.

Other World Computing sells 1 TB OWC Mercury On-The-Go Pro SSDs for $130. The EtreCheck report would appear to indicate that the OP is using less than 100 GB of space on a 1 TB hard drive. So a OWC 500 GB SSD ($75) might be all that the OP needed.