spring cleaning an imac

digitalfailure

digitalfailure

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Is there a way to give an imac a deep clean?

My trusty 24" imac which runs on snow leopard is starting to slow down a little, i run the daily / weekly / monthly routines detailed in cowasaki's mac tips but it's still a tad slower than it used to be.

it's got over 150gb free on the drive , so it's not short on space.

I've never reinstalled snow leopard on it because I can't find the registration keys for some of the software i've installed over the years, was hoping there's a disk defrag type of way to get everything back in the right place.
 
Have you got istats menu? That shows where the bottle neck could be.

Firefox is a performance sapper I've noticed.

I've never reinstalled any of mine and only slow down was actually either running short on RAM or FF related. Flash is also a cpu sucker.
 
What's istats?

I do use firefox, i notice a tremendous lag when i first open firefox,when i launch FF from the dock get a home page open and then get the first page open from the bookmarks bar about 45 secs to a minute have passed depending on other programs being open.
 
Istats menu is a little programme that sits and monitors cpu, memory, network etc usage. It lives in the bar at the top so you can always see what is going on.

I'd try using a browser other than FF for a while and see whether the imac feels faster to use. If not then I'd reinstall. If it does suddenly feel ok then it's down to FF being a slug. I generally restart FF every so often as it gets slower and slower. I don't restart the mac often. Only usually when I do an update that needs it so every other month maybe.

Also a lot of beachball activity can be a sign of overheating. The cpu goes into go slow mode when it gets warm so this can be a double whammy. I had no end of bother with my old G5 until I noticed the inches of dust bunnies on the vents.... cleared them off and it was loads better!
 
Cheers Toxic

I always turn my mac off at night Suz, (just to stop my drobo waking and running every ten minutes). The vents are clean too, so I don't think I have a heat issue. :)

I'll try safari for a bit and then look at other options :)
 
Check out DaisyDisk on the Mac App Store, a beautiful and really efficient way to delete unwanted files you didn't even know you had on your hard drive. it's worth every penny.
 
Are you using Time Machine for system back ups. This can sometimes slow things down when it's backing up.
 
I have time machine turned off by default, just turn it on when I do a back up and then off again.
 
If you want to defrag the drive ( which shouldn't be necessary ) there is a programe called iDefrag which could help.

Could it be that the machine isn't slow, you've just got used to it's speed, and are remembering how fast you thought it was when you first got it. Also do you have any AV software running. This could slow things down.

The other thing to consider is that as developers improve programs they start to add more and more features. This in itself can cause programs to slow down as they are doing more work " Under the Hood"

If you need to do a clean install you could do this using the time machine backup option. This should load every thing back onto your Mac in a a way that preserves all your serial numbers. Ive done this on my MacBook Pro and had no problem. But then I do have all my serial No's logged and safe.
 
1. How much RAM are you running with?

2. Run Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities) and see how much free RAM you have and how much of your Swap File is in use (System Memory tab)

3. How full is your system drive (disk usage tab)? An empty hard drive runs faster than a filling up one.
 
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