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I have a late 2009 iMac that till 2 or 3 months ago was perfect but now keeps beach balling despite memory upgrade to 12GB

I have a late 2009 iMac that till two or three months ago was perfect but now seems to keeps beach balling despite memory upgrade from 4GB to 12GB & Hard Drive space of 120GB out of 500GB. I upgraded the memory having read other articals that this could have been a solution but allas has not. I have restarted, cleared the cache, tried shutting down on a nightly basis etc but it seems like every hour or so everything freezes and the beach ball appears. Any other possible fixes?

iMac, iOS 6.0.2

Posted on Jan 28, 2013 7:28 AM

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12 replies

Jan 28, 2013 7:32 AM in response to DadDancing

Try this basic troubleshooting.....


REPAIRING DISK PERMISSIONS -

NOTE: refer to article "About Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions feature" found herehttp://support.apple.com/kb/ht1452 - for the actual apple article on these step. ----


- click finder in the bottom dock, and in the window that opens, select applications in the left column - scroll through until you see the 'Utilities' folder and double click to open it. Then double click on 'Disk Utility'

- When prompted to select a disk volume or image, select the 'Macintosh HD' in the left column

- ensure the the "first aid" tab is highlighted blue in the middle of the screen

- click the button at the bottom that says 'Repair Disk Permissions'

- this process will take a few minutes to run. It will indicate it's done, by scrolling to the bottom of the "details area" displaying 'Permissions repair complete'


REPAIRING DISK - About OS X Recovery - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718.


- restart your computer hold down command + R keys on the keyboard to boot you into Lion / Mountain Lion Recovery mode

- select english as your main language then the continue arrow

- select "Disk Utility" on the resulting screen then 'Disk Utility' ---


- When prompted to select a disk volume or image, select the 'Macintosh HD' in the left column

- ensure the the "first aid" tab is highlighted blue in the middle of the screen

- click the button at the bottom that says 'REPAIR DISK' .......NOT "Repair disk permissions"

- this process will take a few minutes to run. It will indicate it's done, by scrolling to the bottom of the "details area" displaying "The Macintosh HD appears OK"


If you get any other message OTHER than "The Macintosh HD appears OK", like "the Macintosh HD was repaired successfully" run the "Disk Repair" again, until it displays "The Macintosh HD appears OK".


Once done, restart the computer as normal

Jan 28, 2013 7:43 AM in response to DadDancing

Open Activity Monitor in Utilities. First go to the CPU tab>All Processes, and see if anything is hogging a significant amount of CPU. Also, see if anything is taking an inordinate amount of Real Memory. Next, go to System Memory and post a screenshot of the bottom only. E.g.


User uploaded file


Message was edited by: WZZZ


Suggested reading


http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html

Jan 28, 2013 8:41 AM in response to a brody

The new RAM may or may not have created additional new problems, but the original problem of slowdowns pre-dates the new RAM.


@Dad You didn't provide the information I asked for. Please read again. To post a screenshot, Cmd-Shift-4 then use the camera icon in the toolbar above.


Also get the free demo of SMART Utility to check the health of the drive.


http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php


Message was edited by: WZZZ

Jan 28, 2013 9:20 AM in response to DadDancing

Is this the memory (specs) you purchased:


User uploaded file

Did you install yours so it matches horizontally? Secondly, even though you only have 12 GB installed, your iMac may fall into the category that was discussed here in many threads in 2010 with machines having problems with third party RAM in certain configurations. Here is one of those threads (this may or may not contribute to the problem you are having, but thought it might be enlightening):


https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2588800


Not sure if it was already mentioned, but have you also experimented with only the original RAM and/or only the purchased RAM?

I have a late 2009 iMac that till 2 or 3 months ago was perfect but now keeps beach balling despite memory upgrade to 12GB

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