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Well, I've finally found another excuse beside being lazy not to write. My Apple Mac finally gave up and said I've had enough. Poor thing is about six years old and is so slow it takes ten to fifteen minutes to load a site. It's the 21 inch model and I don't need the larger 27 inch version as it won't fit on my desk, well it could but the size doesn't justify spending an extra $700. The one I'm going to buy is bad enough. Not only do I write my stories on it, but I use it for my business as does my wife for hers also. I've written about sixty thousand words for my Twisted novel and the rest will have to wait for a week or so until I buy my new toy. I wrote this on my Kindle and it took forever,sorry about the delay, Arecee
Comments
Things happen.
Things happen. Take your time.
If it's only 6 years old,
If it's only 6 years old, there are two things you can do reasonably to speed it up enormously.
1) Add more memory. it probably has 2 gigs of ram. Go to 4, and it'll speed up immediately.
2) Change the hard drive for an SSD, and reinstall the OS. (You can probably even go with a newer version)
The two of them together should be less than $200, depending on how big of an SSD you go with.
The system itself is probably still good, with a decent processor even by current standards. They haven't changed very much since the i(number) series of processors was first released.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Sounds like it is swapping
The really long load for pages times for sites sounds like it is swapping
If you fire up Terminal (under Applications/Utilities) and run top you should see "swapins" and "swapouts" values in one of the top lines. If they're changing when you fire up your browser and go to a website, you don't have enough RAM and need to add more.
If you are swapping, adding a SSD without increasing RAM will just wear the SSD out faster. It will appear faster, because the SSD can read/write data much faster than spinning rust, but you haven't addressed the root of the problem which is the "working set" (the memory required to complete a task) doesn't fit in RAM. Keeping the working set in RAM is the best thing you can do for performance.
Hugs
Amy
Unlike the first few rounds
Unlike the first few rounds of SSD's, most current ones aren't likely to self-destruct before the user manages to need to upgrade to a bigger one - even with a lot of swapping.
However, note that I said to do _both_. Just throwing out a current example, I have a firefox app running at home with about sixty windows open (most of which are not scripted pages), and it's using 784 megabytes of ram, and up to 17% of my six core CPU.
_All_ web browsers, on all oses, are ram hogs.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Another approach besides replacing the drive ...
... would be to buy a backup drive, copy the entire drive to the new drive with Carbon Copy Cloner, then reformat your existing drive and install the latest OS you can on it fresh. Once that's done, have it import all of your old data onto the freshly reformatted drive. You should really back up regularly, especially if you use the machine for business.
Also, I agree with Bibliophage. Upgrade the RAM, too. I did that with my late 2009 27" iMac and it really helped speed things up.
I think Apple is due for an iMac refresh, and they have a new product announcement set up for September 8. It's probably just iPhone and iPad related, but you never know. *grin*
Good luck, from a long-time Mac girl!
Randa
I am not an Apple user...
I am not an Apple user...
Being a modern Unix like OS, with a modern Unix like filing system, you should not need to reformat the HD, unless you are re-partitioning it. If you suspect a problem with the file system, the first step should be to run fsck (filesystem check). This should run automatically on startup if the disk was left 'dirty', but could be done manually from single user mode. I think that Apple even has it's own disk utility, that being the case you could probably run a disk check from there; However, some disk problems can only be solved with the file system unmounted.
For memory, you really have to pay attention. Yes, adding more memory will speed things up, but only dramatically so if you're computer is using a lot of swap space (Virtual Memory).
The point isn't a reinstall,
The point isn't a reinstall, but rather upgrade to an SSD drive from the spinning disk. My linux netbook went from a 3 minute boot to a 45-60 second boot.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
bye bye
Thanks everyone you have been very helpful, Arecee
bye bye
Thanks everyone you have been very helpful, Arecee