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November, 2024

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Cleaning up an iMac?

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northeast
Posts: 2119 - Karma: 254
I have a slightly older iMac, 20" screen, it's the same outside look as the newest ones but it's about four or five years old. it's been used by my mom, then my sister, and now I've had it for a couple of years. it's not awful, but it doesn't perform as well as I feel like it could. I know next to nothing about computers, and I'm wondering if there's anything I can do to try and combat the decay of my beloved desktop's operational capabilities.

sparknotes:
I have an iMac and it's oldish and getting slow, and I'd like to speed it up.

as always, +k for helpful answers. thanks in advance, Media & Arts forum!
Feb 26 2013 12:38AM
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Andyktm
Posts: 834 - Karma: -253
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Feb 26 2013 12:42AM
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panojibber.
Posts: 1041 - Karma: 683
Sometimes it can be a good idea to format the hard drive and reinstall the OS.
Pretty drastic but it definitely works. I've done it a few times with my macbook, it'll take up an afternoon doing the whole thing and getting your files back onto it, but its definitely worth the effort.

If you're willing to spend a few bucks, there are a ton of apps that will do this kind of thing for you too.

Do a software update if you haven't already.

Disk Inventory X is a free program that shows you all the files on your hard drive graphically, helps you find a lot of stuff you didn't know you had, and then get rid of it. Kind of hard to explain but I highly recommend it, you'll at least free up some space.

You could also do a defragmentation (is that a windows only thing?), but I don't know how to do it on a Mac.

Hope that helped.
Feb 26 2013 12:55AM
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.qzyxya
Posts: 1479 - Karma: -26
+1 for re-installing the OS.
Another thing is instaling an SSD. It's like night and day, every thing is super fast, it cut my boot times in half on my old computer. Look up 'ssd vs hard drive' on youtube and there are tons of videos comparing them, the difference is crazy. You sacrafice storage space (its about $1 for every gigabyte, really expensive compared to hard drives where you can get 1 terabyte for $60-70)
But the imacs might not let you get into them and change out the hard drive or anything, look up your specific model to see if it can let you.

Another pretty obvious thing is to uninstall programs that you don't need/use
Feb 26 2013 1:07AM
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FiveFootNine
Posts: 31 - Karma: 12
I work on mac's day in and day out. My first question is how much do you want to spend?

if 0 is your answer, check/do the following...

Disk doctor your Mac
check whats launching at start up - System Preferences > System > Users & Groups > Login Items, and uncheck what you want off from the startup.
Clear your PRam - at start up -- cmd-opt-p-r
Clear your ram - at start -- upcmd-opt-n-v


Wanna spend 100 - 250

Buy more ram (FILL IT UP!!). Don't be cheap, replace the old stuff. If the machine is new enough, you maybe able to buy DDR3 rather than DDR2 Ram - you will notice a real difference. make sure you buy the right stuff and the Max amount - amy more will either not work or will be a waste of time.

Check the drive if its full - if so PURGE. If you still have no space Buy an new HD (make sure it spins at 7200 and is a hybrid drive). Hybrid drives are great as the routine actions are stored on the flash and the machine will launch in under 5 seconds. (I have a 17" Macbook pro with 8 gigs or ram and a 750 gig hybrid HD and its stuuupud fast). If you have "acquired" software best thing to do is clone your drive (google carbon copy).

good answers on Mac stuff can be found here...http://forums.macrumors.com/
hope that helps

Feb 26 2013 1:20PM
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Kimmler
Posts: 1316 - Karma: 623
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Feb 26 2013 6:01PM
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--ski--
Posts: 1670 - Karma: 817
All file systems suffer from fragmentation to an extent, but HFS+ is better at reducing fragmentation than NTFS.
Feb 26 2013 7:24PM
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