Any quick fix,speed up iMac ?

My IMac seems to take about 2 minutes to boot up and kick in before I can start using safari,I remember 18 months ago that it took about 40 seconds.

So my question is what can I do to get it back where it was without complicated instructions or people telling me to buy something that does this on the internet.

I don't want to have to go through all the technical stuff like partitioning the hard drive,all I need is something that will do this already part of the Mac programs and is simple and easy to use without complicated instructions.

I'm sure I could get this back to how it was,I guess I could ring Apple as I have 3 year Apple Care but to me this is a issue I should be dealing with and I'm convinced I could some how clean it without doing a reinstall or something.

Cheers in advance if anyone has a simple clear procedure,pleas no technical jargon as I'm someone who justs gets buy and don't use 95% of what this IMac does.

First thing to do is run the Disc Utility that comes with your iMac it will be in the Utitlities folder in you Applications.
Click on your hard drive in the left hand column and then click FIRST AID at the top of the right column. To see if you have any disc permission issues click verify if it shows any click repair disk permissions.

That can sort out some problems. There is a useful article on CNET

Also meant to say that while you are there verify the disk as well.

Edited by deleted (Fri 27-Sep-13 15:48:47)

Cheers matey for that

I imagine that jpl1953 was referring to this article.

If your Mac is just slow to boot but otherwise OK then Step 2 would be a good one to try.

eta- any apps that you've set to "Open at login" (from its Dock options) will be in there, I used to do that routinely for Safari (about a dozen tabs!), iTunes etc until I found out how much it slowed down a reboot

Edited by billford (Fri 27-Sep-13 16:38:30)

Thanks for that mate i had a lot of iTunes permissions wrong or something,about a list of 400....i clicked repair after it done the scan and under each error in the box it said repaired.

I then ran the verify disk and it found no issues...

Only got 5 things listed and 2 of them are sat navigation like tom tom and garmin which i have now disabled.

They shouldn't cause any problem, and without them you'll have to check for map updates yourself- I use the Garmin one.

I'll be interested to know if repairing permissions had any effect- I've never found it ever made the slightest difference to anything.

Which is as you'd expect; either the permissions will allow the OS/app to do what it needs to do or they won't. If they won't then you'll soon know about it, if they will then the fact that they're not what Apple prefer is irrelevant.

Let you know later tonight when I power on the IMac before bedtime.

OK

As a side issue, when you boot it up try running Permissions verify again- you'll probably find those iTunes errors it "repaired" are still there.

Up until Mountain Lion permissions maintenance in OS X was a complete mess, although it never had any effect on anything. It seemed to have been sorted in Mountain Lion, but the latest iTunes update seems to show that someone at Apple has a hankering for the old days

Remember that when booting OS X Restarts the programmes that were running before you shut down, you can disable this from the shut down dialog.
Check your log in items in your account pane so you are not starting up some programmes that you don't want or need.

Yeah your right i still have errors when running disk permissions...

I have 100s of Permissions differ on "Aplications/itune.

Waste of time that was using repair disk permissions

Good advice above but I wonder...

Since the slow down occurred did you update or upgrade Mac OS? When I updated from Lion to Mountain Lion my boot time increased loads. I basically upgraded over the top of the previous installation which I guess is what caused it. When I cleanly reinstalled Mountain Lion (having made a recovery disk (bought Mtn Lion from Appstore), my zippy boot times were back to normal.

One thing I did to get a really fast boot time was to install a hybrid hard drive, a Seagate Momentous XT. These are laptop hard drives but no reason why it shouldn't work for your iMac I don't think. It has a Solid State Disk (SSD) partition in it in which it stores commonly used code including OS and boot up stuff, and learns which things you use most often so you get a speed boost after using it a little while. If you already have an SSD installed obviously it makes no sense to get the hybrid drive.

If you don't wanna mess with things too much then a clean install is probably the best solution. I don't know but can the Time Machine back up thing slow down booting? Maybe disconnect it and see? Have as little connected as possible too (if applicable) just to time the start up. Use your stopwatch phone app mate.



If you've got the space for a larger 3.5" (desktop size) drive, you could maybe go for this one which I just discovered this second.

Edited by deleted (Sat 28-Sep-13 02:27:52)

In reply to a post by time2die:

Waste of time that was using repair disk permissions

It usually is

To be fair to Apple, the First Aid tab does say "If you have a permissions problem ... click Repair Permissions.", the obvious corollary being that if you don't then don't bother!

But it's sloppy coding imo.

Thanks for that Dr Spook you have now confused me even more and this Imac is about to go out of the office window.........I need a degree in PC computer studies to understand all that.....

Yeah, just chuck it out the window. I will be waiting outside to catch and run* off with it!!

If I was living nextdoor I'd pop round and sort it out for ya. I think your best bet is to do a clean install of the OS but check those guides about disabling some of them start up programs you've got running, you know, like the giant magnifying glass one and OAP checker.

*Well, walk very quickly away! Maybe run round the corner first if I'm feeling up to the challenge.

And won't i lose all my installed programs if i do that.

If you've got a Time Machine backup (and if you haven't, why not? ) the Migration Assistant will put your apps and data back.

Yeah I got a time machine back up but I'm not exactly comfortable using it.need to look at the many IMac books I have a get some clear instructions,just out of interest where do I actually find the option to do a clean install .

Just been lazy as I have not looked myself at this moment in time and I would hate to have to start all over again putting all the programs I have bought and downloaded,all my music,all my films,all my photos.....knowing me I would completly [censored] it up Bigtime

In reply to a post by billford:

If you've got a Time Machine backup (and if you haven't, why not? ) the Migration Assistant will put your apps and data back.

Everybody has a time machine with these systems,only you need a external hardrive for them to function,I have WD Mybook Live,pretty simple once you get your head around it but I have to download certain music/ vids to the Mac Drive because this Nass system don't like me doing it directly to that and I get Errors with the program Transmission.

So when I have the file I login to the Nass and copy files from the Mac to the film/ music folder on the Nass system and then do a re/ scan.....

Probably something else I haven't configured correctly but I get by.

In reply to a post by time2die:

just out of interest where do I actually find the option to do a clean install.

That's a good question... prior to Lion you just rebooted from the installation DVD and followed the instructions- it would detect a connected TM backup and offer to re-install your apps and data.

With 10.8 you may have to download the installer from the App store and go from there, I'm not sure if it gives the option of a clean install (ie wiping the disk) or not.

I don't think it does, so in that case you'll need to make your own bootable DVD/memory stick- have a look here for how to do it. Note that it won't fit on a single-layer DVD.

Migration Assistant will restore anything on the OS X HDD that you haven't explicitly excluded in Time Machine- anything on the NAS is your problem

But if it's the iTunes library then that should be OK I think- all the files keeping track of what is where in the library are stored on whichever drive iTunes itself is on.

Edited by billford (Sun 29-Sep-13 16:08:37)

Something has just occurred to me- does the iMac use wireless to connect to your LAN? I've occasionally found one of mine to be very slow to establish a connection (for no good reason that I've ever discovered) and until it has got a connection it doesn't really want to play.

If so, it might be worth seeing what happens with a wired connection to the router.

Nope it's directly into the router and then the BT Modem for Fibre which we had done about 6 weeks ago.

Never had a installation cd this iMac was all pre/installed and the only thing that I came away with from BestBuy at the time was 3 years Apple care.

And on that note that's who I will be asking next,might as well use there services so I shall be giving them a call Monday to ask about my options like a clean install and why it seems to take 2 or 3 minutes to now boot and kick in when it only took about 40 when I first had it,it's not like I have a full hard drive,infact it's a terabyte in size and there is about 870 gig free .

Have rang Apple on several occasions and have found them really good and helpful apart from one occasion when it took them weeks to sort out a problem with my email settings which had my girlfriends name in a greyed out area I could not change to mine.

Apparently it was a server side issue....not that I remotely know what's that all about.

Edited by time2die (Sun 29-Sep-13 18:18:36)

Apple support is usually pretty good, but they can sometimes be a bit hard to convince that a problem is at their end!

See what they say on Monday, if they can't sort it out on the phone they may suggest taking it to a Genius Bar at an Apple Retail store- if they can't sort it out then nobody is likely to. If necessary I'd expect them to have the facilities to do a clean install, but whether they'd also do the migration from your TM backup I don't know, you'd need to ask.

Trips to a Genius Bar can be inconvenient but they're worthwhile (that's from reports here and elsewhere, I've never yet needed them). There's a list of Apple Retail stores in the UK here, hopefully there's one not too far away.

Don't really fancy karting this Imac around if I'm honest ,i have Mountain Lion Installed i was wandering if you can backtrack and install just Lion,i say that because a lot of people that have Lion and based on forum posts i have read seem to prefer that O/S as better than the upgrade Mountain Lion.

Anyway i shall ring them and see what options i have,they may remotely access it and check out whats the issue,just installed this program called CLEANMYMAC and have run that and apparently this has freed up 3 gig of space....Not sure i believe this but I'm going to reboot it now and set the timer.

Edited by time2die (Mon 30-Sep-13 01:34:28)

I skipped Lion (initial comments weren't favourable) so can't comment personally, but most people I know who used it upgraded to Mountain Lion at the first opportunity... but each to their own.

Good luck on Monday

Yeah and excuse all the typo errors in my posts,i bet you think im about 12 or something,only when i read through them again later do i think to myself ...this post makes no sense and how did that word get in that sentence .

Sorry

No worries- I know from your other posts around tbb that you're a (fairly ) normal human being, and I've seen a lot worse

Cheers.