2011-02-15T15:34:32+00:00 Zend_Feed_Writer https://www.augwessex.org.uk/discussions/view/552 AUGW info@augwessex.org.uk https://www.augwessex.org.uk/ 2011-02-11T10:35:56+00:00 https://www.augwessex.org.uk/discussions/view/552#2460 Roy Rainford info@augwessex.org.uk https://www.augwessex.org.uk/ My iMac G5 (non Intel) OS 10.5.8 seems to be slowing down and I wonder if I should do a 'Spring Clean' of sorts. Should I use AppCleaner, Onyx and Monolingual? I have no experience of these and would appreciate any advice, warnings about their use or other recommendations. 2011-02-12T11:46:14+00:00 https://www.augwessex.org.uk/discussions/view/552#2464 Mick Burrell info@augwessex.org.uk https://www.augwessex.org.uk/ Can you give us a bit more to go on regarding the "slowing down"? I've come across one case of slowing down which only applied to online stuff and was a broadband not computer issue and another where the old machine was not slowing at all but the owner was getting more used to the speed of the new all-singing-all-dancing iMac ;-) 2011-02-12T17:16:27+00:00 https://www.augwessex.org.uk/discussions/view/552#2467 Roy Rainford info@augwessex.org.uk https://www.augwessex.org.uk/ I can't give anything factual about slowing down Mick. It's just a feeling and I think your last point about comparison with my new iMac is probably right. However is a 'Spring Clean' occasionally not a good thing? 2011-02-12T23:42:49+00:00 https://www.augwessex.org.uk/discussions/view/552#2469 Euan Williams info@augwessex.org.uk https://www.augwessex.org.uk/ Hey, it's almost Spring anyway, and new Macs sing and dance for joy as Mick wisely points out! You should certainly practise good health and hygiene by using Disk Utility to check your drive data structures and repairing permissions say, every month to six weeks or at any time things seem odd. Safe Boot is a great specific. The occasional ordinary restart will do no harm. But a good beginning would be to restart with your shift key held down (Safe Boot), and keep it down until a progress bar or other indication that the system is being fired up happens. Safe boot is SLOW, so be patient, but it clears all sorts of caches, checks the disc structure and much else that Apple doesn't divulge. You will know that it has done a safe boot when the log in screen says so in red. Remember to restart "normally" afterwards. You can use Onyx (the correct one for your OS version from Titanium software) within Safe Boot as it's a Macish front end for OSX (Unix) Terminal commands. Safe Boot confines Mac operation to Apple-supplied stuff only. You should recover quite a lot of "locked-up" memory space, too There are so many things that can cause "slowness" (apart from new Mac syndrome) from a dodgy hard disc surface, too little spare HD space, permissions gone sour, too many apps open at once, Time m/c in over-active use, that offering specifics without sitting in front of the mac is difficult. Do you always check your Mac's HD and permissions before installing updates? Many people take pride in being lazy about that ;-) You might open Utilities > Activity Monitor, and look to see if any particular process is hogging the CPU. Sometimes this happens. If so, select the process name, and use the red button at the top to quit it. Restart, and check again after a while to see if the problem re-arises. All that's just for starters, so keep a cool head and think logically. Don't forget to keep good backups, and let us know how you get on. Enjoy the Spring. 2011-02-13T11:30:49+00:00 https://www.augwessex.org.uk/discussions/view/552#2470 Roy Rainford info@augwessex.org.uk https://www.augwessex.org.uk/ Many thanks Euan. Lots to work on there. In reply to: "Do you always check your Mac's HD and permissions before installing updates?". Afraid not but I do check Permissions - occasionally! 2011-02-14T14:28:08+00:00 https://www.augwessex.org.uk/discussions/view/552#2472 Derek Wright info@augwessex.org.uk https://www.augwessex.org.uk/ And to think we had a sticky of useful tips put at the top of the forum to help people along.... 2011-02-15T15:34:32+00:00 https://www.augwessex.org.uk/discussions/view/552#2475 Gordon Clyne info@augwessex.org.uk https://www.augwessex.org.uk/ If it's apps that are slowing down, it might be the way they are written for the intel hardware, primarily, and for older machines, there is still the indianness conversion to do to run the binaries, and that is a nest of performance issues that you don't want to know about.... So its important to determine the "slowness", if it's just disk searching, app behavior or file fragmentation.