When typing, it takes time for my typed letters/numbers to show up. Sometimes I get the dreaded color pinwheel. Please help! :)

Your information line says you have an iMac running Mavericks, did you buy this iMac used or new? Just curious since Mavericks has not been installed by Apple for over a year.

Do you have any software running in the background, things like cleaning programs, MacKeeper, anti-virus software? The behavior you are describing is typical of those programs. If you have them, they should be removed as they actually serve no useful purpose in a Mac.

You can also download a handy little routine that will examine the system and tell you where the loads are occurring, go tohttp://www.etresoft.com/ and get etrecheck, run that and you will see the things that are running and eating up resources.

With that information it will then be possible to give you more advice on how to tune up the iMac and improve its performance.

I know everything is bigger in TX, my daughter lives in Flower Mound, near DFW. Macs do have a learning curve since they have different needs rom PCs...such as anti-virus is a bad idea.

While the iMac is running, the software you normally use, go to the Finder, Applications, Utilities, Activity Monitor. Look at the Memory and see what it shows in the center of the window, the Memory Pressure - if it is green your loading of the memory is fine, yellow and you are getting to the point of using virtual memory (the hard drive), and red you are overloading the memory and need to reduce the applications you have open.

The cpu tab shows how heavily you are loading the professor, should not be an issue unless you are running some heavily cpu-intensive applications like video editing, graphic programs that do ray-tracing, heavy duty gaming.

The other tabs, the hard drive and networking are rarely an issue for most users.

Under the cpu tab you can also see what programs are using high cpu time, not as easy to follow as etrecheck but a start.

One of the great little books is iMac, Portable Genius from Wiley publishing, gives good overview info on using the iMac. Barnes and Noble is your friend 🙂

Ralph

Please post the Etrecheck output.

Welcome to the world of Mac. Some ‘light’ reading to help the transition. I don’t recommend trying to get through all of this at once.