My imac (7years old) is now really slow. How can I speed it up myse lf.I have never done anything to it since I bough it..t it f

If it is the original harddisk, the disk could be slower because it is searching for usable sectors.

Disk Utility, select the disk, see if it even has a SMART status (older disks may not).

If you have not backed up, make a clone.

That was an invitation to ask more question, not just a dismissive statement.

Report back with more questions if needed.

Newer disks have SMART status. Yours is likely too old.

Step one is to save what you can ... immediately.

You can download CarbonCopyClone (donateware -- pay if it saves you) or SuperDuper ($30 purchase, I think). Buy an external disk drive (self-powered, probably USB 2.0 is all you can get). Make a "bootable clone". That mean you can replace your internal disk, then boot to the external clone using the "option" key at startup, and re-clone the external image back onto the new internal and pick up where you left off.

Bad thing is disk drives are very expensive right now (60% more expensive than 6 months ago) due to floods in Thailand and labor strkes there.

You have a very old system (not to say you should lose it, just that I know nothing about those older systems).

You may want to start a new thread: "What is good replacement disk for 7 year old iMac?"

Include the iMac data (AppleMenu > About This Mac > More Data). This is my system's display, and you should post the "imacx,y" number.

How much disk space is available ?

And how much memory is installed ? Open the Apple System Profiler (under the Apple menu, select "About This Mac" and then "More Info". Does this report the amount of memory you expected to see ?

You say it's never been upgraded, but the profile says OS X 10.5.8, but 7 years ago OS X 10.3 was the OS. So has the OS been upgraded ?

All the iMacs of that era came with 256MB RAM, running OSX 10.5 on this would be impossible, not sure how you installed it either, OS X 10.5 installer checks for 512 MB RAM.

When you're using it, can you open Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder). How busy is the CPU graph, and how much red / yellow / blue / green is there in the System memory pie chart ? Activity Monitor shows totals on the left, you could copy and paste those instead of trying to describe the pie chart.

Usually you catch some grief for "posting twice" on a subject. But the original text of this post may not attract the direct attention on "which hard disk?".

Those who catch the most heat for "double post" are the ones who post the extact same question twice within 5 minutes in two different forums ... you see why they catch heat and you likely will not.

AND

I stand corrected.

If I read this post right. You have a 2005 Imac150 gig hard drive with 2 gig's of ram. You have been using it for 7 years and doing some upgrades to it. Os 10.5.8 is as new an OS as you can do on a g5 Imac. AS you use a computer adding and deleting files the files get very fragmented. Opening an app. can make the computer/ hard drive look through several sectors for all the files in that app. If you had a utility like techtool pro, you could defrag and optimize the drive. But you would still need to have a backup to your drive. Cloning your drive is useful,but, if you ever had to use the cloned drive to install an OS , you would be installing a vey fragmented oS back on. But if you use the cloned drive just to retreive the files and apps you don't have install disks for or are able to download that would be good.Then you could do a clean install of your system. do the updates reinstall the personal files and apps. Everything is fresh and unclutered. You drive should have S.M.A.R.T statis as I have a 2005 Mac Mini and it does.

Under "system memory" Under the chart it showa "2.00 GB" Then on the side it shows Free 882.07 MB Wired--228.68 MB.....Avtive--816.4MB----inactive--113.25MB---Used--1.13GB

Your fine. 882.07mg free is great!

VM size 43.8GB Page ins. 291.47MB----Page out 0 Bytes----Swap used 0 Bytes.

Another good sign. Page out 0 Bytes

Disk Usage--148.93GB...Space Utilized 69.04GB.....Space Free..79.86GB.

You have room on your harddrive Space Free..79.86GB.

CPU-60 to 85% Idle Average

I'm not sure about this. We need to look into this more.

Could you post a picture of what you see. command +shift + 3

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You need an external Firewire drive to boot a PowerPC Mac computer. A G5 computer is a PPC.

I recommend you do a google search on any external harddrive you are looking at.

I bought a low cost external drive enclosure. When I started having trouble with it, I did a google search and found a lot of complaints about the drive enclosure. I ended up buying a new drive enclosure. On my second go around, I decided to buy a drive enclosure with a good history of working with Macs. The chip set seems to be the key ingredient. The Oxford line of chips seems to be good. I got the Oxford 911.

Has everything interface:

FireWire 800/400 + USB2, + eSATA 'Quad Interface'

&

save a little money interface:

FireWire 400 + USB 2.0

This web page lists both external harddrive types. You may need to scroll to the right to see both.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/eSATA_FW800_FW400_USB

Ditto,

these figures look bery good - wish I had that much free RAM and disk.

CPU usage is a bit high for an idle computer just running activity monitor. I can only guess that the top CPU process may be mds or mdworker. If it's not, post back.

To upload a picture, click on the camera icon.

It's in this icon bar.

from your computer

click on browse

insert image. this can be a little slow.

Robert

My Ginger - You are factually incorrect. Cloning a drive is in fact the best and quickest way to defrag.

All the files get written to the new drive unfragmented, and in proper sequence, eliminating fragmented space also.

All that's then required is to erase the internal and clone back.