I'm Gonna Toss This Thing -- So Slow

Instead of posting a complaint first start searching through the iMac forums for help and suggestions. There's plenty to be found if you spend some time looking.

If you are going to post a topic make the topic a specific problem complete with as much relevant information as possible to assist in troubleshooting. This includes more complete information on your hardware, configuration, software, error messages, etc.

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Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance

For disk repairs the best third-party utility is Disk Warrior. DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption. However, DW is not yet compatible with Intel Macs. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.1 is Intel Mac compatible.

OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility called Macaroni that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep.

OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.

I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc.

For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline.

When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.

Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is significant):

1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. SuperDuper (Commercial)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - not universal binary.)
7. LaCie SilverKeeper (Freeware - not universal binary)
8. RsynchX 2.1 and PsyncX 2.2.1 (Freeware)

Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.

Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.

Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com.

Hi ween,

I feel your pain!

First thing is try this link: http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/performance.html - read and see if any of the suggestions help your cause. Pay special attention to the section "Perform regular maintenance"... see how it goes and post back...

Good luck, Rick

iMac G5 iSight 20" - 30G iPOD in Slimming Black - Mac OS X (10.4.7) - HP Pav 15" WS and Toshiba Sat 17" WS LP's - Canon 20D & A620

Great response, Kappy, and one I'm going to file away for myself.

I'm curious about the maintenance scripts running only when the Mac isn't sleeping. Will they run if the display screen saver is running or if the display has been put to sleep (while the HD still spins)?

I use the Terminal to run the scripts, so you can do them anytime...

I do sleep my machine and somehow find the time to run the scripts... even if you sleep your computer it SHOULD pick the next available time to run them. Or you can do them manually...

Good luck, Rick

iMac G5 iSight 20" - 30G iPOD in Slimming Black - Mac OS X (10.4.7) - HP Pav 15" WS and Toshiba Sat 17" WS LP's - Canon 20D & A620

How much ram do you have?
I would put more ram in the computer.
Because I have a iMac G5 and when I had 512 Meg of ram it was so slow and now I have 1.5 Gig of ram and now it is alot faster.

I agree with more RAM. I recently updated an iBook G4 from 256mb to 768mb and the speed bump is astounding ( maybe 3x faster ). OS X is a real memory hog and if there's not enough, it will start using your hard drive for virtual memory - super slow. Like in the old days of "memory creep," just because you quit an app doesn't always mean that the physical memory used by that process will then be released to the rest of system. Apple now recommends at least 1GB for use with OS X though it will function with only 128mb. If you look at Activity Monitor and launch Safari, depending on the page it will start using 50-60mb of real memory. Start going to more involved pages or load an extra tab or two, then open iTunes...suddenly your system is asking for 4-500mb. I hope you get your problem solved. It would be a shame to go back to Windows.

P.S., if you'd like, go ahead and click the "Helpful" or "Solved" buttons on any of the posts / replies above if you feel they were helpful or adequately answered your question.

Why not call Apple..(did you buy Applecare?)
If you really want to "toss it" I will pay shipping from You 2 Me...L

Kappy's response was born out of your original post. You didn't give specifics, so he was trying to address as many possibilities as he could. You say "every application." Which ones specifically?

When you say it is slow on the internet, are you meausre the speeds using a site like PC Pitstop or is it a "seat of the pants" measurement?

What speeds are you paying for?

Which browser are you using?

Are your applications Intel-native apps or are they PPC-apps running through Rosetta?

What steps have you taken? The only thing you mention is that you use OxyX. Great start, but OnyX can't cure everything.

There is only so much we can suggest without you being a lot more specific. I truly do understand your frustrations, but don't take them out on Kappy.

"I find it difficult to find help on this site"

ween,
Last night I spent two hours reading various Apple articles that were new to me regarding iTunes and iPods. I read those articles not here at Discussions, but at Support.

After two hours of reading, I was able to determine that it may take me quite some time to become either proficient or expert. I read nothing confusing or contradictory, just had to stay focused on the particular products that interested me, as it's easy to go off and start reading something that's "related" but that won't do me any substantial good this early in my learning curve. For instance, there's absolutely no point in learning about iTunes 6 (or 4 or 5, for that matter) when in fact I already have iTunes 7 installed.

To reach Support, click on the purple "Support" tab at the top of this page, then narrow down to your area of interest, where you can view a main Support page for a particular Apple product.

Since you're still new to Mac, you need to review the main Support page for the Intel based iMac and also the main Support page for OS X Tiger (10.4). At this point, you need to stay away from the main Apple sales information areas and from the Apple Store areas, and from the Discussions.

Go through the main Support page and read everything (including tutorials) targeted to the beginner or new user. Ignore the troubleshooting aspects in favor of learning the basics. At this point, you should not be expecting problems, but you should try to take the attitude that your iMac will at some point "just work" and therefore at this time you should be concentrating on how to avoid problems, not how to solve them.

I may get some flack from other posters, some much more learned than me, for suggesting this, but, after you've had nine months of not being able to benefit AT ALL from your new iMac, the only thing that makes sense to me is that you should save all your important files to some location other than your iMac, and entirely erase your iMac and start from scratch. I'd recommend adding nothing to your iMac until you have the basic setup running like greased lightning. I see no point in saving your settings since it's been working so poorly for you until now. Who knows where the problems started?

The install from the original grey-labeled DVDs is simple to perform, whether you choose the "easy" install or "customized" install, and all the software updates are much less daunting when not performed singly, but in the now condensed form that will be offered to you once you've completed the fresh OS install of 10.4.4 from your DVDs.

For example, instead of doing multiple OS X updates, there will only be a single Combo update that will take your iMac from 10.4.4 to 10.4.8. Same thing with most other things, except some of the iLife applications take two software updates to bring them current.

First, however, check that there's nothing wrong with your cable's delivery of internet access. If necessary, pull out the Dell to verify that your cable modem is doing what it should, and that there are no firmware updates available for that particular piece of hardware either from the manufacturer, or from the cable company that may have provided it to you.

You might email them or phone them to be certain. After nine months, another day or two to exchange email about that shouldn't be too bad. In addition, you should probably check at your cable provider's website to see if there's a place where you need to adjust some settings. While it's been several years since I had a cable hookup, I seem to recall that one of the things they wanted was to know what type of hookup I'd be making with what brand of computer, or some such. I may be mistaken, or that may no longer be relevant, or that may not be the case with your cable provider.

Good luck, and keep at it, as satisfaction is undoubtedly closer than you expect:))

P.S.
If your OS is still at 10.4.5, that may be part of your problem, as there actually ARE fixes for problems (issues) introduced in each each Software Update. There's no point in erasing to start over if you do not intend on updating your software. Since 10.4.4 was the earliest Intel version, some of the earliest discovered issues (for some users) were not resolved until at least 10.4.6

Message was edited by: myhighway

Ween

You need more Ram and should be updating the system to the lastest verizon.

Rick

More ram!

I think 512 MB is marginal on an Intel iMac. Of course it depends upon what you do. I have 1.5 GB. It's usually OK. But even 1.5 GB becomes an issue if I run enough stuff on it. (I'm a developer, so I'm talking about running a substantial Java-based server, several browsers, some Office components, maybe a Photoshop.) I'd actually normally recommend 2 GB with hardware like this. That's what I have on my PC.

I doubt the tricks you typically see will make much difference.

In the finder look at Applications and open the subfolder Utilities. You'll find a thing labelled "Utility Monitor". Double click it. This will let you see what is going on. I'd choose "all processes", and click the % column. That will show you where the CPU is going. It will show you if anything is running away.

I find that web browsers often start taking over the system after a day or two. Both Safari and Firefox, and both Mac and PC. When this happens you have to kill the browser and restart it. You may have to force quit it.

You can also look at the memory column to see whether any programs have grown to be unreasonably large. If you click "system memory" you'll see memory usage. You ought to see some free or inactive memory. (Free and inactive are similar.) Page ins and outs ought not to be growing rapidly. If you don't have enough memory or you have a lot of paging, you need more memory.

The first thing to do is at least 1gb of ram. if you can afford more, do it. I don't know what programs your using but if the program is not made for the intel chips, it will run under rosetta (emulation for ppc software). This would be real slow with only 512 mb of ram. If the apple software is slow, upgrade the ram and run the maintenance scripts (or use Mac Janitor-free), then repair permissions. If you do these 3 things, you should see a faster computer. For comparison, ever see xp run on only 512 of ram? Its doggy too until you bump it up to 1 gb. Hope this helps.
Randy