I have an iMac with Leopard. The machine is about a year old and, for the most part, has performed well. However, a month or so ago, the machine started running very slow. Here are some issues:

-- Moving from one application to another, or opening a new application like iPhoto or iTunes, takes a very long time. The Dashboard takes forever to open, for example.

-- Web pages take a long time to load/open, even basic pages like Google tend to hang for an extended period.

-- Any sites with video, like YouTube, cause the system to slow to a crawl. The beach ball spins constantly.

If this was a Windows machine, I would swear I had a virus.

Any ideas?

 

Sounds like a usage gotcha. OS X will, occasionally, require reboots to clear out its swap and temp file space. If you're in the habit of sleeping the machine often, rather than shutting it down and booting it, you might want to try that.

Also, the UNIX underpinnings have various periodic housekeeping processes that run every so often in the wee hours of the morning. If you sleep or shut down the machine, they won't run until the next boot event happens.

So, first I'd just try a reboot, and if that doesn't fix it we can go farther down the list.

 

also if hard drive is nearly full and fragmented.

 

How much ram you got...some times it goes bad as well. Reboot, repair permissions...delete the finder prefs. and reboot again...

 

Whoa...I just went to "about this Mac" to check. I'm supposed to have 2GB, but this doesn't appear to be the case:

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac6,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 512 MB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: IM61.0093.B07
SMC Version: 1.10f3

 

Will this work in my iMac? Why in the hell is it so cheap? Crucial is good RAM isn't it?

4GB kit (2GBx2), 200-pin SODIMM, DDR2 PC2-6400 upgrades for Apple iMac 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (24-inch) Desktop/PC, CT817149 from Crucial.com

 

No, you need PC5300 DDR2 memory that runs at 667 Mhz.

 

File fragmentation is a fairly non-issue on the HFS+ file system OS X employs, performance wise.

 

sorry, didn't know that.

 

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac6,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: IM61.0093.B07
SMC Version: 1.10f3

When I purchased the iMac, I upgraded to 4GB (2X2GB) of Corsair. I guess when I started having these problems, something happened to the RAM. As you can see above, the machine was only showing 512MB. I removed the Corsair and replaced it with some Crucial that I bought locally and all is well now. The machine runs much, much better.