Is my 3 Year Old IMAC Obsolete ?

[dan_south]

<blockquote>

<p>4 MB Memory</p>

</blockquote>

<p>That can't be right. If you meant 4 GB RAM, you should still be okay for a while.</p>

[sknowles]

<p>I agree with Daniel's advice, but add that the problem may be the 4 GB memory. Check the Activity Monitor for system memory usage. You may have too many applications running (even if idle or hidden) and too many files open. I replaced my PPC G5 this month with 4.5 GB of memory and it routinely nearly maxed out with a CS 4 Suite apps open with other apps. You many simply need to add 2 GB's memory, but I would still upgrade to Snow Leopard.</p>

[bossie]

<p>I have a Mac similar to yours, 4 yrs old. Mine begun slowing down last year and I traced the problem to internal hard disk. It was writing data very sluggishly though the read speed was okay. I was not sure was caused the problem but what I did to to solve the it was to create an OSX partition and boot from an external firewire HD. I did not bother to replace nor use the internal HD after that. Still using OSX 10.5.8, and photos are stored in a second fw hard disk.<br>

I have Snow Leopard 10.6.3 upgrade disk but holding out for now until it is really necessary to move up.</p>

 

[digitaldog]

<p>There are defrag products for OS X. But one way to do this without spending too much is to use something like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner (that’s free). You take a drive and format it, do a full backup. Boot off that drive, format the original boot disk then use the same utility to copy over the data. Now some defrag products suggest they defrag and place files in an optimal order. You still have to boot off another driver for a full defrag and its usually equally time consuming. SuperDuper has a script to do all this for you making the process at least very easy. Depending on who you talk to, some say OSX with its Unix underpinnings doesn’t need defrag, others say it does. With very large files, its said to be a good idea. </p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>I agree with Daniel on all points (do not recommend a clean reinstall of the OS or upgrade to SL, defrag etc as a solution to your speed loss) except this.</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Hardware issues such as bad RAM would cause the machine to crash, not simply slow down.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Usually, yes. But sometimes flaky ram can indeed slow you down and do all sorts of things. Sometimes it only happens after the machine is warm and sometimes it will only show it's ugly head once in awhile after you've heavily taxed your machine. Ram problems are so common and so easy to check for that it is the first hardware check that is normally done.</p>

<p>If you do proceed with a new install of SL, for $80 I'd purchase a newer, larger, and faster hard drive and be on the safe side.</p>

[digitaldog]

<p>Bad RAM almost always manifests itself on the Mac with lots of crashes, especially with ram intensive app’s like Photoshop. If you are not seeing this, just a slowdown, the cause if quite unlikely bad RAM. There are ways to test this. If you have the Graphing Calculator app, set it up to run over night without any other app’s running. If you wake up and the Mac hasn’t crashed, the likelihood its bad RAM is very, very low. Or you can try Memtest. Memtest OS X is a command-line based ram-testing utility for Macintosh computers. You can find it here: <br>

<em>http://www.memtestosx.org</em></p>

[greg_peterson3]

<p>In the computer business we have a saying: "If it works it's obsolete."<br>

But there's some good advice offered by the pervious posters. <strong>Put in as much RAM as will fit!</strong></p>

 

[martin_kelly]

<p>As others have suggested, do not upgrade to Snow Leopard unless you absolutely have to. You say that at the moment your prints are good. That could all change with an upgrade to the OS. I spent months trying to get my printer to work with Snow Leopard.</p>

[Brad_]

>>> As others have suggested, do not upgrade to Snow Leopard unless you absolutely have to.

 

Who are the others above that are saying that? Works great for me. And no doubt millions of others...

[digitaldog]

 

<blockquote>

<p>Who are the others above that are saying that? Works great for me. And no doubt millions of others...</p>

</blockquote>

 

<p>Me too. No problems printing or otherwise once I got updated drivers. </p>

[sknowles]

<p>Good suggestion. I use Checkup from App4Mac (recommended by Apple but with a big caveat - don't run it on Leopard, only Snow Leopard). It has the real-time system monitor program along with other tools, one of which is a memory chip checker. You run it by itself with no apps overnight. It does about a dozen checks of the memory chips and takes 8-12 hours. It will find any problems or failures with your hardware. But again don't run it on Leopard. It wasn't designed for it and is a system hog. Upgrade to Snow Leopard first.</p>

[ray .]

My iMac is 4 years old and I still run 10.4.1 on it. Runs good. All I've done is max out the

memory, and occasionally I'll run disk utility on it.