Buying older Macs have been great subject of discussions over the web. There are plenty of online platforms which sell used Mac computers to people willing to buy. Among the best known sites that offer good deals are:
- Amazon
- eBay
- Mac of all trades
- The Mac Store
With such shopping sites, buying an old Mac is same as buying a new one. One puts a lot of research & fact-findings to seal the deal. However, it is quite frequent that used Macs may not perform up to expectations of the user. After buying such an old iMac, one may add RAM, SSD or HDD and other additional hardware to match the speed like a new one.
Find the reasons of slow iMac:
Check RAM size. Go to Apple Logo and click ‘About this Mac’. Further Click More Info<<Memory. The Apple will let you know the RAM it has. If the old iMac had 2GB of RAM, then it is advisable to upgrade it to at-least 4GB for quick execution of the OS X tasks. iMacs love RAMs so they won’t mind even 8GB or more, however, a RAM update has to be aligned with the system specification of the iMac. Sometimes, an overdose of RAM may not be digested by a system.
Format Hard Drive: When you have received your iMac through reseller, it is advisable to format the drive & reinstall an OS X. You might go for latest OS X Mavericks after confirming that iMac model will be compatible with OS X 10.9. Check here for system compatibility with OS X Mavericks http://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/
Activity Monitor: If might be that you still be crawling on the iMac even after RAM & Hard drive updates. Under this situation, it is good to closely watch Activity Monitor so that one can know the memory consumption by several apps & programs. If you find any default app using too much of RAM, then one can take preventive measure against it.
Disk Repair: Through Disk Utility, Verify/Repair Disk permissions. Older hard drive is more prone to logical corruption. Even a minor corruption on the disk may cause the entire OS X to crawl. Moreover, it will also fail the efforts of speeding up the iMac through various other resources like RAM etc.
So, above factors are simple to implement and they will definitely resolve the slow speedup of iMac. However, under some conditions, one may has to opt for advance level of optimization.
Hard drive fragmentation: A purchased iMac as old as 2-5 years may have developed colony of fragments on its drive. It is more common when you have no idea about the history of the purchased old iMac. It might have been that, iMac was used to run heavy software including Video-Editing, Animations etc. The development of fragmentation is most common when OS X runs large applications. OS X itself handles fragmentation on a file which is less than or equals to 20MB. When user works on bulky software, the files created on the drive are more than the mentioned size (20GB) and thus drive develops fragmentation. With more & more fragments adding to the drive, the OS X will begin to crawl in order to access files from various drive locations.
Tips to remove fragmentation:
Find the reasons of slow iMac:
Check RAM size. Go to Apple Logo and click ‘About this Mac’. Further Click More Info<<Memory. The Apple will let you know the RAM it has. If the old iMac had 2GB of RAM, then it is advisable to upgrade it to at-least 4GB for quick execution of the OS X tasks. iMacs love RAMs so they won’t mind even 8GB or more, however, a RAM update has to be aligned with the system specification of the iMac. Sometimes, an overdose of RAM may not be digested by a system.
Format Hard Drive: When you have received your iMac through reseller, it is advisable to format the drive & reinstall an OS X. You might go for latest OS X Mavericks after confirming that iMac model will be compatible with OS X 10.9. Check here for system compatibility with OS X Mavericks http://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/
Activity Monitor: If might be that you still be crawling on the iMac even after RAM & Hard drive updates. Under this situation, it is good to closely watch Activity Monitor so that one can know the memory consumption by several apps & programs. If you find any default app using too much of RAM, then one can take preventive measure against it.
Disk Repair: Through Disk Utility, Verify/Repair Disk permissions. Older hard drive is more prone to logical corruption. Even a minor corruption on the disk may cause the entire OS X to crawl. Moreover, it will also fail the efforts of speeding up the iMac through various other resources like RAM etc.
So, above factors are simple to implement and they will definitely resolve the slow speedup of iMac. However, under some conditions, one may has to opt for advance level of optimization.
Hard drive fragmentation: A purchased iMac as old as 2-5 years may have developed colony of fragments on its drive. It is more common when you have no idea about the history of the purchased old iMac. It might have been that, iMac was used to run heavy software including Video-Editing, Animations etc. The development of fragmentation is most common when OS X runs large applications. OS X itself handles fragmentation on a file which is less than or equals to 20MB. When user works on bulky software, the files created on the drive are more than the mentioned size (20GB) and thus drive develops fragmentation. With more & more fragments adding to the drive, the OS X will begin to crawl in order to access files from various drive locations.
Tips to remove fragmentation:
- Arrange a larger external drive and format it with HFS partition using Disk Utility. Now transfer all data to this external hard drive. Re-format the Mac hard drive and install fresh OS X on it. Now copy backs all the files & folders from the external hard drive to OS X drive. This will help reduce no. of fragments and thus improves the speed of OS X.
- Use a third-party defrag Mac app to remove fragmentations. To find best defrag Mac App click here.
- Once fragments are taken care of, user will experience a boost in the performance of the OS X, since the OS X is accessing file information through contiguous memory locations.
Failing hard drive:
When the drive is not fragmented but still acts wei
rdly slow, then it is recommended to cross check the stability of the drive.When the drive is not fragmented but still acts wei
- Repair the hard drive using a professional Mac volume optimizer. The disk utility may not be able to repair all corruption on the disk. To find a dedicated disk repair Mac software click here.
- Replace the hard drive with a new one. This also proves to work. User must find out an appropriate replacement for their iMac. Drive Replacement will cause an immediate impact on the speed & performance of the old iMac.