Trying to figure out why my wife's iMac is running so slow. My iMac is 3 years older and runs smoothly with no problems. Hers is a "mid 2011" model 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 with 4 GB memory 1333 MHz DDR3. Running the latest Mac software and have installed all updates. Has 923 GB space remaining of 1000. I tried googling for answers and deleted a few applications and stopped all programs from opening at launch, but nothing has seemed to help. Only thing I can think of is that she has the Adobe programs on her iMac (Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, etc.). Any advice? Any luck with the Clean My Mac programs? Thanks

There is an Automator program called maintenance that works fairly well

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There is an Automator program called maintenance that works fairly well

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Ooooo - hadn't seen this before.

Not sure what can be slowing down your mac. I've had a few issues running the Adobe suite on my MacBook Pro, but I think that boils down to some graphic card issues I'm having.

A good place to start is to open Disk Utility and verify the disk (button on the right - you won't be able to repair the disk running it normally so that button will be gray) and also run the Repair Permissions task.

If verify disk finds any errors, you'll have to restart the Mac in Safe Mode or using the Recovery System to run the repair.

Support can be found here for these http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1782

You can do more invasive stuff later if required.

Thanks for the replies. Will be trying these after work today.

I don't know if this will make any difference, but having a bunch of crap on your desktop can (supposedly) slow you down. If your wife is like mine who saves everything to the desktop, you might throw it all in a folder and put it away.

Again, probably won't make a difference.

Try bending it

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I don't know if this will make any difference, but having a bunch of crap on your desktop can (supposedly) slow you down. If your wife is like mine who saves everything to the desktop, you might throw it all in a folder and put it away.

Again, probably won't make a difference.

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Actually, this could help quite a bit. OS X assumes anything you have saved on your desktop is going to be used frequently, so it loads all of those items into memory at startup so they load quickly when you open them.

So if you've got a bunch of stuff just "saved" on your desktop, move it to documents or whatever.

That should help a lot.

Appreciate the info. She definitely had a good amount of stuff on her desktop so hopefully putting that into fewer folders will help things. We will see...

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She definitely had a good amount of stuff on her desktop so hopefully putting that into fewer folders will help things. We will see...

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Just to be clear...you will need to move items out of the "Desktop" folder. Just consolidating all of the items on the desktop into one folder on the desktop won't help.

Anything in the "Desktop" folder gets loaded into memory. So make sure only essential items are in there.

Oh. Haha yeah that would help. I'll look at it tonight.