imac running slow

Run this test and post its results here.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

The warranty entitles you to complimentary phone support for the first 90 days of ownership.

If you bought the product in the U.S. directly from Apple (not from a reseller), you have 14 days from the date of delivery in which to exchange or return it for a refund. In other countries, the return policy may be different. If you bought from a reseller, its return policy applies.

My recommendation is that you uninstall Chrome from your iMac. Chrome is known to drag down the performance of a Mac. Though Chrome is a solid browser in terms of features, it is poorly coded for OS X. On your iMac, Chrome Helper on its own is using 1.06GB of RAM, while the browser itself is using up 311MB. So 17% of your RAM resources are being consumed by one application. Stick with Safari. Safari is less resource intensive, and offers faster page loading compared to any other browser for OS X.

Another issue is that I question whether you purchased a 21 inch screen with enough RAM.

There are many things the are going to be a hindrance to performance in the 21 inch screen iMacs.

First, your Adobe Apps use a serious chunk of your iMac's computing resources, including RAM.

All of the 21 inch screen iMacs use integrated graphics, rather than a discreet and independent graphics chip, meaning that the needed VRAM for your iMac's graphics comes from the total physical RAM installed in your iMac.

So, New versions of OS X need a sizesble chunk RAM (OS X, by itself, ideally needs up to 8 GBs of ).

Your iMac's graphics processor also steals/borrows a varying amount of RAM depending on the graphics needs at the moment.

This means there is simply NOT enough RAM left over for applications, like your Adobe CS suite that needs more CPU, GPU and RAM resources.

Another problem that is impacting some of your performance, too, is that the 21 inch screen models now only use slower 5400 RPM laptop standard hard drives rather than the "normal" 7200 RPM desktop standard hard drive.

The rotational speed difference means slower read/write speeds to the drive.

So, with this info, you have some decisions to make.

If you have had this iMac for less than 14 days, you can return this iMac for a better, faster one.

Get one with either a faster i5 CPU or the even faster i7 CPU for that model, get either a hybrid Fusion Drive instead of just a plain hard drive or optional SSD ( supplement the smaller SSD size with a good quality, faster 7200 RPM external thunderbolt or USB 3.0 hard drive) and get this model iMac with the maximum 16 GBs of RAM.

Good Luck to you.

hello bro! sorry for replying this late because what I'm about to say now has been tried out by me too, so I'm completely sure that it will work on your system too!

so, I own a 21.5" 4k imac running on 3.1Ghz Intel core i5 with 8gb ram and a terribly slow 1Tb 5400rpm hdd . . . . so all I did was buying self an SSD which was Samsung 850 EVO 500GB indeed and an Enclosure to set the 2.5" 7mm thin ssd in place and for the Enclosure's purpose, I chose inateck 2.5" SATA Enclosure and then finally I put the ssd into the enclosure and plugged it into my imac via the USB 3.0 port and downloaded the "carbon copy cloner" which I further used for cloning the existing hdd to my newly bought ssd. . . . finally, I went to system preferences on my imac and clicked on "startup disk" and set the new cloned ssd as my current drive and then clicked restart and then "Tadaaaaaaaa" . The boot up was speedily done as well as I loaded a couple of apps and they too were speedily opened unlike the sluggish response times of the previous 5400rpm drive! I hope this information has helped you!

That's a very good solution to the slower than molasses 5400 RPM hard drive issue!

🙂