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Slow imac recommendations


andytoad
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6 minutes ago, yorks5stringer said:

I've just had the Graphics card issue  with mine from 2010, pixelated screen and won't boot up. Looked into the fix and for the same money am buying another one. Luckily got a recent backup.

Tried all the hacks like wrapping it in a blanket and pressing weird combinations of buttons.....

Slumming it on an old laptop at the moment, very slow.

Yes, will be cost effective to buy another (refurb or secondhand).

Make sure you remove the hard drive before getting rid of it. I would advise reformatting the hard drive, but as you say it's no longer working, you'll have to manually remove it, else the info on the hard drive may be recovered by some unscrupulous person!

Edited by hooky_lowdown
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23 minutes ago, BrunoBass said:

So the general consensus it that CleanMyMac (sounds like something Columbo might say...) is worth the money and offers a noticeable improvement in speed? 

well, I have noticed a difference tonight, so if you have £20 spare, it may well be worth a try. 

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1 hour ago, miles'tone said:

I think you can go pretty slow with immac, don't take too long though as it will start to burn. On the other hand if you're waxing it's best to just grit your teeth and rip it right off hard. Horses for courses.. 

I'm somewhat disappointed that this thread existed for about 4 hours before someone did the iMac/Immac gag.

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To be fair cleanmymac mainly gets rid of junk and helps you carry out some simple performance tweaks but it’s not going to make a huge speed difference unless you get your files structured and sorted. Like I say it’s best to offload as much as you can to iCloud even if you have to pay for some storage (I think I pay £2 a month?) and get rid of anything you don’t need. Whether that means you move things you want to a flash drive then do a compete refresh or not depends on the volume of stuff I guess. If you were quite tidy and regimented from the off then it’s quite painless. 

In terms of iCloud storage if you don’t already know you can backup your entire library folder without needing to drag and drop anything to another system or service. So all your files appear on your OS just as they would normally but they aren’t actually in your computer if you don’t want. You can manually purge folders/docs to the cloud or just let it happen automatically and recently used docs will be downloaded to your computer too for easy access but it all works seamlessly and across all devices. 

I’ve been an advocate for cloud computing for a long time now. There’s almost nothing actually physically stored on my computers, I could happily wipe it all tomorrow and carry on where I left off just by signing back in on a new machine. 

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Prompted by this thread I have found a local company that can fit a 512GB SSD to my 2012 model for £200 including a clone of all my data across onto the new drive. They're collecting this afternoon. I have almost nothing on my hard drive so 512bg is more than enough - I just looked and I've got 919.91 GB of 1TB available!

 

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19 hours ago, hooky_lowdown said:

Yes, will be cost effective to buy another (refurb or secondhand).

Make sure you remove the hard drive before getting rid of it. I would advise reformatting the hard drive, but as you say it's no longer working, you'll have to manually remove it, else the info on the hard drive may be recovered by some unscrupulous person!

Yes, was going to do that, don't want anyone else  to see those photos (Basses..)

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Well, I received the extra whopping 8GB RAM today and fitted it. No glitching so far. I might go for a SSD on payday see how I get on with the current improvements, to be honest I have no complaints so far in the last 24hrs. I might leave as is.

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38 minutes ago, andytoad said:

Well, I received the extra whopping 8GB RAM today and fitted it. No glitching so far. I might go for a SSD on payday see how I get on with the current improvements, to be honest I have no complaints so far in the last 24hrs. I might leave as is.

If it's working fine now, no need to go for the SSD. If you encounter a slowing in the future than you know now what to do next. 👍

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As has been said the two biggest speed improvements to older Macs are more RAM and swapping a spinning disc for an SSD. Ignore what Apple says - their RAM is usually made by Samsung or Hynix and is no better or worse than off the shelf offerings from the same or other well-known memory manufacturers. Kingston had a reputation for high quality back in the day - not sure if it is still true.

Aside from bloatware one of the most well-known reasons for slowing down is that OSX is fundamentally a UNIX OS and has scheduled jobs running in the middle of the night daily, weekly and monthly. As many people have their computer off at that time, the jobs never run so log files get bigger and more bloated over time, eventually slowing down the entire OS. Part of the job of the tools mentioned in this thread is to run those jobs and clean out any errant log files.

There’s not too much else you can do with the Mac OS - but if you had 8Gb RAM originally then that’s probably the single biggest culprit for it slowing down over time - OSX has always been memory-hungry (god help you if you run any Adobe products) and 16GB should be an absolute minimum for a machine of that age. There is an inbuilt utility to check memory and performance but it was never particularly accurate - something like one of the tools above is more likely to give you a clear picture of what is making it slow(er).

Best of luck!

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My 2009 iMac is creaking a bit. My son is now running an external SSD on his 6 year old macbook (usb3) and running 40 audio track sessions straight off the external drive. Sadly, my iMac only has usb 2 so I am not sure if the data transfer will be fast enough. I would be quite happy to just buy an external SSD and run it off that. Does anyone have any thoughts? I could open it and dump an SSD in there but am minded to go for an i7 2.3Ghz 2012 mac mini with 16 Gig of RAM, SSD and buy a 32" screen. 

Any thoughts?

TIA

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2 hours ago, owen said:

My 2009 iMac is creaking a bit. My son is now running an external SSD on his 6 year old macbook (usb3) and running 40 audio track sessions straight off the external drive. Sadly, my iMac only has usb 2 so I am not sure if the data transfer will be fast enough. I would be quite happy to just buy an external SSD and run it off that. Does anyone have any thoughts? I could open it and dump an SSD in there but am minded to go for an i7 2.3Ghz 2012 mac mini with 16 Gig of RAM, SSD and buy a 32" screen. 

Any thoughts?

TIA

What do you use your iMac for?

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1 hour ago, owen said:

I upped it to the (in theory) max of 8 gig.

Ok, do you have lots of free space on your hard drive? When a hard drive gets to below 100gb  of free space you'll find certain things will slow down. A switch to a SSD drive will make the whole system more responsive.

Edited by hooky_lowdown
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Grr! I just ordered a 1TB SSD from Crucial, but I got an email saying out of stock. I’m going to get some adhesive strips for the screen off of eBay, and I hope to replace my ageing 5400rpm HDD soon. The machine is a late 2013 iMac 21.5”.

There are loads of videos on YouTube from ifixit and others on how to do the dirty deed.

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I have a Mac mini 2012, the last one you could upgrade easily and it runs fine as it has an SSD. I have quite a few computers but they all boot off SSDs. I had an older iMac, 2007, that was a bit too slow, we have what I think must be a 2011 iMac, that has an SSD in so that is ok, but it has older software so it has a few problems. I have a later MacBook, but haven't updated anything past that.

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