slow mac

It would help us to help you if we could have some more technical info about your iMac.

If you so choose, Please download, install and run Etrecheck.

Etrecheck was developed as a simple Mac diagnostic reporting tool by a regular Apple Support forum user and technical support contributor named Etresoft. Etrecheck is a small, unobstrusive app that compiles a static snapshot of your entire Mac hardware system and installed software.

This is a free app that has been honestly created to provided help in diagnosing issues with Macs running the new OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

It is not malware and can be safely downloaded and installed onto your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Copy/paste and post its report here in another reply thread so that we have a complete profile of your Mac's hardware and installed software so we can all help with your Mac performance issues.

Thank You.

Mavericks really slowed down my 2010 iMac. Adding more memory did the trick for me.

I had a virus scanning program too. Deleting it really sped things up.

If you are running Time Machine, that will slow things down. I found a program that allows you to make Time Machine only run at night.

Lastly, if you have external drives (as I do) they slow things down.

Upgrade your RAM and remove sophos.

While Apple's requrements for Mavericks is 2GB RAM, you will find any computer slow with only 2GB RAM.

How to upgrade your RAM:

Open System Profiler > Hardware

Copy the Serial number and model identifier

Go to this page: http://support.apple.com/specs/

Copy the Serial number in the "Search Tech Specs" search box. This will take you to the info on your computer.

(Note: Apple specs often do not show how much you can add to older computers. Macsales has tested and found more RAM can be installed than indicated by Apple. If you are upgrading an older computer, I suggest checking with sales first to see how much more you can add.)

Next using the Identifier and with the knowledge of your exact model and how much RAM you can install, go to this site: (There are several sources for memory. This one has good prices and has the video showing how to install)

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/

You can find install videos here:

http://eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/

Also remove MacKeeper. Sophos is just unnecessary, but MacKeeper is flat out nasty. Remove it ASAP.

I suspect you also had adware installed.

See Thomas Reed's excellent site for help removing adware.

The Safe Mac » Adware Removal Tool

http://www.thesafemac.com/art/

Good catch. I missed MacKeeper.

len ruedl, the forums are full of users with computers that no longer work correctly after running these so call 'cleaners' (Memory Clean, CleanMyMac, and MacKeeper). Do not install any third party so called Mac cleaning utilities. They can do harm to your Mac.

While you can remove the cleaner, it's harder to add back the files they removed that are needed by your Mac. You might want to do a clean install rather than try to remove bits and pieces that are causing you problems.

A Silverstone wrote:

If you are running Time Machine, that will slow things down. I found a program that allows you to make Time Machine only run at night.

Time Machine will not cause a noticeable performance impact unless your machine already has some problems and is on operating under very marginal conditions to begin with. I strongly encourage you NOT to modify the behavior of Time Machine, lest you do something to negatively impact your backups. Your backups are the single most important thing related to your computer that you have, unless you don't care at all about your data.

dianeoforegon wrote:

I suspect you also had adware installed.

Yup, I see the Spigot adware in the Etrecheck report.

When you first turn on Time Machine it can slow down your Mac as it backs up all files, but after that the changes are minimal and you shouldn't see any noticeable difference in performance.

As thomas_r. recommends, keep Time Machine turned on.

In principle I agree with having Time Machine on when I am actually using the computer. Because I have my iPhoto library on one external drive and keep the Time Machine backup on the external drive, it is painfully slow. The more experienced 'geniuses' at the Apple Store will tell you that Mavericks is not good with Time Machine and external drives. The solution for me was to use Time Machine Editor and set it to run when the computer is inactive.

I'd feel better having it run the way it is intended. If you have tips on speeding the process, I'd love to hear them so I can run it all the time.

Considering Time Machine is meant to be used on an external drive, I think you must have misunderstood what the geniuses where saying or they are full of crap. I doubt you will find anyone here that would recommend only running Time Machine on a limited basis. If that was Apple's intention they would have designed it to work that way.

While I agree with you, I can't find any other way to make my iMac run smoothly.

I can't say my Genius experience is always edifying. They get younger and younger.

There's probably some other un-identified issue at play.

I suspect you have USB 2.0 drive as your Time Machine drive. New Macs come with USB 3.0 but no FW ports. You would need an adptor to run FW on a new Mac.

You might consider getting a new FW drive, but considering you have a 2010 machine, I would start saving for a new Mac instead.

USB 1.1 = 12 Mbit/s

Firefire 400 = 400 Mbit/s

USB 2.0 = 480 Mbit/s

FireWire 800 = 800 Mbit/s

USB 3.0 = 5 Gbit/s

Thunderbolt = 10 Gbit/s

USB 3.0 is 10x faster than USB 2.0

Thunderbolt is 12 times faster than FireWire 800 and up to 20 times faster than USB 2.0.

Is time machine on the same external drive as Iphoto library - or on two separate drives.

Apple does not recommend putting partitioning the time machine backup drive - it should just have time machine on it.

Slow down does depend on what you are running and what has changed when time machine starts a backup - Was moving photos out of iphoto to work with in Photoshop - and the backups took a bit longer because of the size of the pictures.