My iMac has gotten slow lately. The (wireless) keyboard lags if I type while a program or dialog box is opening. A couple of Chrome tabs crash every day. A few days ago, Preview and TextEdit started crashing on open. Finder sometimes takes over seconds to come up when I click it in the dock. TextEdit sometimes takes ten seconds to launch, sometimes takes two.
Info dump:
I have an iMac from 2007, upgraded a year ago by a third-party vendor, currently with these specs:
- Processor: 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- RAM: 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
- Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256 MB
- HD: 1 TB ATA Disk (466.76 GB free)
- Backup drive (nightly 4:30 AM backups with SuperDuper): External 1 TB USB Disk (479.21 GB free)
- OS: Lion
I usually concurrently use:
- Adium
- Google Chrome (often six to twelve tabs open)
- iTunes
On top of that, I often open one to three of these apps:
- Pixelmator
- Photoshop
- TextEdit
- The Hit List
- Word
- The official Twitter app
- Transmission
My menu items include:
- Textexpander
- Last.fm scrobbler
- Dropbox
- Flux
- iStat Menus
My active Chrome extensions are:
- Adblock Plus
- Add Facebook Events to Google Calendar
- Better Gmail
- Clickable Links
- Clip to Evernote
- Google Calendar Checker
- Google Mail Checker
- Google Reader RSS Subscriber
- History Calendar
- Hover Zoom
- Instachrome
- Logitech Device Detection
- Missing e
- Page One
- Read WSJ Extension
- Reddit – display user link titles
- Reddit Companion
- Reddit Enhancement Suite
- Search by Image (Google)
- Speeddial 2
- StumbleUpon
- Turntable Scrobble
I have about a dozen disabled extensions.
Here's a screenshot of Activity Monitor with Chrome (three tabs), iTunes, Adium, Hit List, Activity Monitor and Word open.
The top of the computer is uncomfortably hot to the touch. I tried tracking the system temperature with iStat Menus, and it reported 50° C and lower.
What's making my computer so slow? Too many Chrome extensions? Not enough RAM? Dusty insides?
My MacBook Pro, on which I do the same work, run the same apps (though usually not iTunes) and the same Chrome extensions, behaves much faster. It has 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM and a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
Best Answer
Here's a few things I would try:
Do basic system maintenance (repair permissions, clean caches, run daily-weekly-monthly maintenance scripts). I like ONYX (http://bit.ly/eCzYfj) for doing this, but there are plenty of other options that do the same thing.
Make sure you have at least 20% free disk space. If not, try clean up and free some space.
If things are still slow, try creating a new user account and logging in with that. If that account runs much better you still have some cleanup to do.
Check your login items (in system preferences, User & Groups). If there are login items you don't recognize/need try disabling them.
I would also look into investing in at least a 2MB memory upgrade. Not too expensive and it looks like you could use it.
Good luck...