Why imac so slow

When you use browsers and other programs, various files are put into temporary storage areas known as caches. These caches do things like speeding up web page loading when you return to websites. Apps may also create log files to help with troubleshooting.

That can lead to a slow-running Mac. To be on the safe side, you should first back up your Mac. You can read more about this in our guide to clearing caches on your Mac. Your web browser might be another factor that slows down your Mac. Common culprits in this situation include having too many extensions installed.

Extensions can be useful in many ways, but they can also slow your Mac down. Removing them can help, and you can do it manually or automatically. Check the list of available extensions and delete the unnecessary ones by selecting them and clicking Uninstall. You can also update extensions by clicking on the Updates icon in the left-hand sidebar in the App Store.

If you want to know which Chrome extensions are making your Mac run slowly, take a look in the Chrome task manager. If you have a ton of tabs open in your web browser, it can easily slow down your Mac. The more you have open, the harder your Mac needs to work. These browser tabs can eat up memory before you know it. Open the Activity Monitor. You may also find that some of the web addresses in Activity Monitor are actually extensions, rather than open web pages. If so, follow the previous advice about uninstalling or disabling them.

This opens Chrome's own task manager, where you can see how much resources are being used by each tab. Look through the list to see if any are using a lot of RAM or processing time. Macs are generally secure, but they can get viruses and other malware. Common sources are malicious websites, file sharing apps, and booby-trapped email attachments. They might, for example, use your Mac to send out junk emails to millions of people. One way to reduce the chance of a malware infection is to limit what apps can be installed on your Mac.

By allowing apps to only be installed from the Mac App Store, you can improve your chances of staying virus-free. As well as being more cautious with file downloads, you should clear caches and run antivirus software to keep your Mac free of malware. For more information, read our guide to checking for malware on your Mac. Alternatively, give MacKeeper a try. As well as optimization and privacy tools, it offers excellent antivirus scanning and removal. Select them and click the minus symbol.

This only accounts for some of the processes that run at startup. There are also likely to be some that run in the background as well. Dealing with those is a slightly different process, though. Read our guide to changing startup items to learn more. Eventually, they will all break down and stop working. With some components, you might get decades of life out of them. But with others, five years is the average lifespan. Of course, how long you get depends largely on how often you use your Mac.

And when hardware does fail, it can be sudden and obvious or slow and subtle. So if your Mac is running slowly, it could be caused by a component that is still partially working but which is starting to fail. In many cases, the hard drive or SSD is what goes first.

But you can get macOS to check your disk for errors. But if it only says there are errors on the disk, you can attempt to fix them using Disk Utility. Occasionally, some of the data on your Mac can get corrupted. If it finds any, it will try to fix them. In a worst-case scenario, you may need to reinstall macOS to get your Mac back up to speed. For more detailed guidance, check out our tutorial on fixing disk errors. If they get too warm, Macs will not only spin their internal fans faster — they might also throttle the speed of their components so they generate less heat.

This is to prevent parts like the processor from getting too hot and sustaining permanent damage. Overheating is less of a problem with Mac Pros, which have roomier cases. If your computer is getting too hot, these quick ways to stop your Mac overheating might help.

It might have been fine when you bought it, but newer software is generally more demanding. Older Macs can struggle to keep up. Is your Mac using too much RAM and running out of memory? Are certain stuck processes causing your Mac to slow down? Activity Monitor shows all processes in real-time. The following is an overview of the various tabs in Activity Monitor, as well what to look for in each category:.

Is a certain app or process causing excessive CPU load on your Mac? If a process is consistently taking up a high percentage of processor power, it may prevent other apps, or macOS itself, from doing all that it needs.

You can quit that process to see if it resolves the performance issues. Click Quit. If the process clearly states what it is, you know which application might be the cause of the issue.

You also want to check the graph and information at the bottom of the window. Try running fewer applications simultaneously to see if that takes some load off the processor. Quit them often to free up RAM. If you use a laptop, this tab can help you identify which applications are using the most energy, and reducing the amount of time you can use your Mac each day. The Energy Impact column shows the current power usage, but this varies a great deal depending in which apps you use.

The most important column is 12 hr Power. This shows which apps have used the most power over the past twelve hours, including time when your Mac was asleep. The Disk category shows the amount of data that is read and written for your entire system all drives.

The Network tab shows you how much data is sent and received, and you can find out if any apps are sending or receiving a lot of data over your local network, or over the internet.

This could slow down your Mac because the apps reading or writing from your drive. Unused apps are the biggest space-wasters. All of us download applications that seem helpful and exciting at first but turn to clutter up our disk instead of being used frequently. Mind the fact that if you delete the apps, the chances are that some leftover files will remain on your Mac. Its Uninstaller module shows how many apps you have and gathers all leftovers in one tab — so you can quickly delete them.

Not many people know this, but every desktop icon is, in fact, a little active window that your macOS has to render and process. If there are myriads of icons, no wonder your Mac is slow. To make your Mac run faster, organize files on your desktop into separate folders.

Right-click on your desktop and select Use Stacks. Then, you can move them to another location. Never hesitate to send to Trash things you rarely use, like apps you had downloaded months ago.

In other words, if your browser is slow, your Mac will be slow too. Even the fastest machine can be dragged down by hundreds of opened tabs and extensions. Hidden add-ons, plug-ins, and extensions often come disguised as free software. You download something and the next moment see weird search bars, pop-ups, and torrents of advertisements on your screen. And lastly, such tools may stealthily collect your data. All your user files and applications may over time become a heavy burden for your macOS.

This is tied to your user account. It simply contains too many caches, cross-links, user logs — more than your Mac can chew. Though it sounds a bit radical, you can activate a new user profile.

It is absolutely safe and is a bit like starting a new life. You will have to copy all the needed app files such as Preferences to the new user. As a result, your Mac may become much snappier. To transfer your important files from one account to another, you need to drop them into the Shared folder which is found on your hard drive. Animations and rich graphics are extremely resource-hungry. We are not suggesting you should switch your Mac back to style simplicity.

But in the case of a slow Mac, the less is sometimes more. Click "Minimize windows into application icon" and change Genie effect to Scale. The scale is a much simpler zoom and less taxing on memory. SMC stands for System Management Controller and manages a whole range of low-level functions of your Mac: fans, lights, power, system volume, and other parameters.

Quite often SMC preferences get broken and your Mac gets slow. Now, click System Report. Choose Controller in the hardware section — if your Mac has a chip, there should be Apple T2 Security Chip on the right. This memory is like fuel for all your apps. But that is a time-consuming operation that will chip a few bucks off your wallet.

Luckily, there is a shortcut. You can perform this operation if your system urgently needs a fresh memory. This is often the case with media converters and video editors that consume all the RAM they can get.

If you followed the tip from the previous section and downloaded CleanMyMac X, you should be able to perform another trick that proved quite effective on most Macs. From our experience, it does boost up the performance of many applications. Running this command helps to clear your Mac's memory with a few clicks.

Try it and see how your Mac is doing. An often-reported lag that could seriously alter your productivity. Sometimes, when you type, your keyboard would freeze for a fraction of a second. This lag usually affects the Notes app as well as Chrome. The issue is reportedly caused by outdated system caches that are responsible for keyboard performance. Entering the Safe mode erases lots of unneeded caches and repairs some software paths inside your macOS.

Just as with humans, some Macs are more difficult to wake up than others — no matter what keys you are pressing your screen is still black. Normally, the standby mode activates after 3 hours of no operation. You can prolong this time by using a command in the Terminal. What it does is change the standby threshold to 24 hours so your Mac takes a quick nap rather falls into a deep sleep. In order to reverse it, you will need to change the number in the above command to Files on your Mac have permissions that determine which applications and services are allowed to access these files.

Over time, permission problems occur, causing your macOS to lag, freeze and even crash. Once in Disk Utility, you need to highlight your startup disk and click on the First Aid tab.

Now click on the Run button, then press Continue and your Mac will scour your drive, finding and fixing permissions so that next time an application needs that file, your Mac can find it immediately.

However, not all apps receive these automatic repairs.