Reoccurring 'stuttering' problem with OS and applications

D

diddydustin

Registered
I've owned my iMac for around two years. For a long time (and for about 6-8 months after installing Leopard) my Mac ran flawlessly. However, about a month ago, I noticed first in iTunes that when working moving through the song list, playing songs, or performing other general tasks, the iMac would either pause while it was thinking to do whatever I asked, or I would get the beach ball. This continued into Photoshop, where before it worked great, now "stutters" along when doing almost anything, and the beach ball is there much much more. The OS will also sometimes also take 2-3 seconds to just move a window.

The iMac is running Leopard with 2.16 Intel Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of RAM. I have around 30GB free on my 250GB HDD. I try to keep all applications running in the background to a minimum, and activity monitor shows that I have plenty of free resources. I'm just trying to figure out why the performance on my Mac has decreased. Almost anything I do I encounter some "stuttering" in the application, and even certain games that worked fine before have strange glitches in the rendering.

Can anyone tell me how to resolve an issue with these symptoms? Do I need to provide more information? First time posting here.
 
go to hd>users>library>preferences and find apple system preferences and drag to trash can; restart-new prefs will be created. this will probably fix it.
dickster--------------------------------
 
Okay, I will try this when I get home. I was always an avid PC user and had a good base of knowledge to fix them. However, I am learning performance tricks and other options to troubleshoot with.

I am curious, what led you to believe this may fix my issue? Is there a preference somewhere that is not cooperating well with the rest of the machine? And this will put everything back to default settings?
 
It just sounded like your systems were slowly becoming confused and needed to get back to base one.
i have found that using an old saying "k.i.s.s.[ KEEP It Simple Stupid " works,
especially for me cause i usually try to get real complicated on things. i have a sign on my monitor to remind me.
dickster--------------------------------------------
 
Didn't seem to work... I'm really confused by this. I also followed directions at http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html to perform routine maintenance for my Mac... still didn't seem to fix the "stuttering".

Does anyone else have a clue of what I can try? Why this would be happening? Or has anyone had similar issues before?
 
repair permissions

check your disk activity with Activity Monitor

try Preferential Treatment

Run through your mind what new programs you in stalled around the time the troubled started

One of your memory boards could be bad
 
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