System running very slowly

How much free space do you have left now, and how big is your hard drive? You may have sufficient to stop the warning message, but still not enough for your iMac to run smoothly. You can also try repairing disk permissions from Disk Utility, or booting from your Lion recovery partition, command R as you boot, and running Disk Utility repair disk. Another option is to download the free Onyx for Lion. "OnyX is a multifunction utility for OS X which allows you to verify the startup disk and the structure of its system files, to run miscellaneous tasks of system maintenance, to configure some hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, QuickTime, Safari, Mail, iTunes, login window, Spotlight, and many of Apple’s applications, to delete caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome, and more." Re preventing an overfull disk, you can simply keep your eyes on usuage. It would be useful to know what data is filling up your hard drive then a suggestion can be made.

You should never, EVER let a conputer hard drive get completely full, EVER!

With Macs and OS X, you shouldn't let the hard drive get below 15 GBs or less of free data space.

If it does, it's time for some hard drive housecleaning.

Follow some of my tips for cleaning out, deleting and archiving data from your Mac's internal hard drive.

Have you emptied your iMac's Trash icon in the Dock?

If you use iPhoto, iPhoto has its own trash that needs to be emptied, also.

If you store images in other locations other than iPhoto, then you will have to weed through these to determine what to archive and what to delete.

If you use Apple Mail app, Apple Mail also has its own trash area that needs to be emptied, too!

Other things you can do to gain space.

Download and install OmniDisk Sweeper.

This app will help you locate files that you can move/archive and/or delete from your system.

STAY AWAY FROM DELETING ANY FILES FROM OS X SYSTEM FOLDER!

Delete any old or no longer needed emails and/or archive to disc, flash drives or external hard drive, older emails you want to save.

Look through your Documents folder and delete any type of old useless type files like "Read Me" type files.

Again, archive to disc, flash drives, ext. hard drives or delete any old documents you no longer use or immediately need.

Look in your Applications folder, if you have applications you haven't used in a long time, if the app doesn't have a dedicated uninstaller, then you can simply drag it into the OS X Trash icon. IF the application has an uninstaller app, then use it to completely delete the app from your Mac.

Download an app called OnyX for your version of OS X.

When you install and launch it, let it do its initial automatic tests, then go to the cleaning and maintenance tabs and run the maintenance tabs that let OnyX clean out all web browser cache files, web browser histories, system cache files, delete old error log files.

Typically, iTunes and iPhoto libraries are the biggest users of HD space.

move these files/data off of your internal drive to the external hard drive and deleted off of the internal hard drive.

If you have any other large folders of personal data or projects, these should be archived or moved, also, to the optical discs, flash drives or external hard drive and then either archived to disc and/or deleted off your internal hard drive.

Also, both OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion use a lot more computer CPU, GPU, RAM and hard drive resources than any other previous versions of OS X. 4 GBs of RAM isn't a lot of operating RAM for these later versions of OS X and future versions of OS X may even be more demanding on older Macs.

Your model iMac can take a maximum of 16 GBs of RAM.

My advice is to install either another 4 or 8 GBs of additonal RAM.

Correct and reliable Mac RAM can be purchased from online Mac RAM sources Crucial memory or OWC (macsales.com).

Good Luck!

🙂

Back up all data immediately as your boot drive may be failing.

This diagnostic procedure will query the system log for messages that may indicate a hardware fault. It changes nothing, and therefore will not, in itself, solve your problem.

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator. I've tested them only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, they may not work as described.

Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:

syslog -k Sender kernel -k Message CReq 'Channel t|GPU D|I/O|n Cause: -' | tail | open -ef

Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).

Launch the Terminal 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 Terminal in the icon grid.

Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).

The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.

A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. Normally the command will produce no output, and the window will be empty. If the TextEdit window (not the Terminal window) has anything in it, post it — the text, please, not a screenshot. The title of the TextEdit window doesn't matter, and you don't need to post that.

Hi Linc,

I tried this with my MacBook Pro and the TextEdit window was blank. My computer is running very slowly. Does my result show that there is no hard drive issue?

packer-texan,

This thread is 10 months old, inactive, and about iMacs, not MacBook Pros. Please start your won thread in the MacBook Pro forums here:

MacBook Pro

Be sure to include as many details as possible, as Apple mentions in this, from "How to post a good question:

To help other members answer your question, give as many details as you can.

• Include your product name and specs such as processor speed, memory, and storage capacity. Please do not include your Serial Number, IMEI, MEID, or other personal information.
• Provide the version numbers of your operating system and relevant applications, for example "iOS 6.0.3" or "iPhoto 9.1.2".
• Describe the problem, and include any details about what seems to cause it.
• List any troubleshooting steps you've already tried, or temporary fixes you've discovered.