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I've got a Mid 2014 iMac that's for the first time started to run a bit slow.. Any ideas on best way to clean it up? It's got about 10 years of crap on it from previous mac too. Wondered if there's a decent cleaner anyone has used that won't install loads of crap on it?
Advice for any computer system of that age...
Back up and sort out what you need and make sure you have all the files you want and can find them.
Do a clean fresh install, organise what you have properly and start good backups going 🙂
i'm on High Sierra, which isn't what came with it, how to i do a re-install?
no idea - best get a mac person for that!!
But getting your files sorted and organised is a good start
i’m on High Sierra, which isn’t what came with it, how to i do a re-install?
Theres a sequence of buttons you hold down on start up depending which version of macOS you want to install
Apple have a how to guide. MAKE SURE YOU MAKE AN EXTERNAL COPY OF ANYTHING YOU WANT TO KEEP FIRST
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/ht204904
MAKE SURE YOU MAKE AN EXTERNAL COPY OF ANYTHING YOU WANT TO KEEP FIRST
Make sure you have a copy of anything you want to keep regardless of whether you're resetting anything or not.
A Mac doesn't generally slow down just for the sake of it.
The 2 main causes of this IME would be a) a failing HDD (should be able to check this with Disk Utility) or b) some software has been installed or some system task is continually doing something and this is using up resources. You can check this using the Activity Monitor and Console Log respectively. A complete wipe & re-install is a (drastic) way of sorting these problems! No reason not to re-install with High Sierra though,
Macs don’t file in the same way as Windows computers, so fragmentation doesn’t happen; hence, no need to defrag. A fresh OS is also the last thing to try, once you’ve done a good bit of housekeeping - https://www.computerworld.com/article/3218709/apple-mac/how-to-speed-up-a-mac-in-11-tips.html
High Sierra is the latest OS, you can’t reinstall an earlier version
Defragging is a thing of the past anyway, even in Windows. Or at least with a spinning hard disc Windows will do it for you if actually necessary, which often it isn't.
SSDs also shouldn't be defragged. Windows actually disables defrag on SSDs. There is a separate optimisation called TRIM for SSDs which just needs enabling in the OS. Windows 8 and beyond should have it enabled by default for SSDs.
Mac OS X apparently only enables it for SSDs that ship with the OS and is cautious about allowing it on drives you install yourself (for compatibility reasons, or avoiding lawsuits most likely if it goes wrong, but sounds like it's not really a problem as Linux kernel blacklists bad ones. https://www.howtogeek.com/222077/how-to-enable-trim-for-third-party-ssds-on-mac-os-x/ )
My iMac (27" 2009 core i7/16GB) takes quite a long start to log in. I have found that spotlight is apparently scanning all my files, and I have no idea why. I have many music files etc. Also there could be something in the depths of the ~/Library directory with a possible spotlight importer causing issues. I'll most probably set up an ssh session and tracing stuff as I log in via the front end at some point.
A good test is to create a new account and log into it - is it fast? If so it is something to do with your account and not the mac per se.