iMac getting progressively slower

[Mario8672]

I've had my white iMac Core 2 Duo for a year now, and it seems to be getting progressively slower. For example, in iTunes, when I click a playlist, there is a one-second delay before it "clicks" the playlist on the screen.

Another example is with Quicktime 7 (pro); to open any 700MB movie, it takes about 5 minutes for it to open, and until then, QT is totally unresponsive.

This happens daily with Finder, Quicken '07, Adium, Safari, Dashboard, and the left side of the menu bar (spotlight, international, time, airport, etc).

Is this normal?

I don't have any apps which "open at login" and I still have 40GB left of my "160GB" HDD.

Thanks.

[Qion]

It's definitely not normal. I use my iMac for data-heavy pro apps, and it does fine.

The obvious stuff to do is repair disk permissions and run some clean-up apps. In my experience, though, I've found the best thing to do is reinstall OS X. It's really not as drastic as some make it out to be.

Run Activity Monitor and watch what processes are using the most resources. This can be enlightening.

[Mario8672]

Originally Posted by Qion

It's definitely not normal. I use my iMac for data-heavy pro apps, and it does fine.

The obvious stuff to do is repair disk permissions and run some clean-up apps. In my experience, though, I've found the best thing to do is reinstall OS X. It's really not as drastic as some make it out to be.

Run Activity Monitor and watch what processes are using the most resources. This can be enlightening.

Thanks for the reply. The most intense apps are Safari with 290MB of RSIZE. The other apps I mentioned are using less than 70MB of RSIZE. I'll try repairing disk permissions and do some spring cleaning and see if it helps.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, while the other apps I mentioned don't use much RSIZE, they all each over 800MB of VSIZE each.

[Qion]

Those are typical memory footprints. Hm... do you hear the hard disk working all the time, or see constantly unnecessary CPU usage?

Hopefully the basic maintenance will help.

[eric2006]

read everything here:
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Speed_Up_Your_Mac

notably, desktop icons are treated as windows and slow down your computer a lot (leopard maybe different?)

Also, look at console to see if there's any repeating errors.