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Yup, that old chestnut.
It's a mid 2011, fully updated, and is painfully slow, especially on startup & coming out of sleep mode.
Can anybody recommend a checklist of DIY things to do, before carting the thing off to the computer shop?
TIA
I recently rebuilt the Spotlight DB on mine and it seemed to help.
System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy tab
Add you hard disk(s) to the list. Close System Preferences, then reopen System Preferences and remove you hard disk(s) from the Privacy tab. When you close System preferences (again) It'll rebuild your Spotlight DB which can take a bit fo time, so don't do it when you need to use the Mac.
Swap the HD for an SSD apparently that makes a huge difference.
I swapped the Hdd to ssd in my 2011 Mac mini. Made a massive difference
Max out the RAM then replace HD with Solid State Drive. Massive difference. You don't say what model it is, but successive Mac OSs seem to want more and more RAM and the SSD makes a big difference all round.
Ah, right. It's an iMac mid 2011, 2.5 Ghz Intel Core i5, 4GB 1333MHz DDR3.
Apologies for not being more specific earlier - I'd forgotten that the 'Big' Macs are also called . . . er . . . Macs.
Not sure that prying off the back and swapping bits is something that I'd want to be doing myself, what with being hopelessly non-techy.
Wipe the hard drive, install the newest OS & newest versions of your programs and start again from scratch, setting up the OS for speed (plenty of guides readily available for this). Then change to a solid state drive and maximum memory if you're still not happy with the speed and don't mind spending some money.
Apologies for not being more specific earlier – I’d forgotten that the ‘Big’ Macs are also called . . . er . . . Macs.
Well, I'm talking from experience of a mid-2011 MacBook Pro which may have different needs and wants to a desktop iMac and are generally easier to work on.
The ifixit.com website is good for detailed repair instructions and on some iMacs, stuff like fitted extra RAM is very easy. Changing drives is generally more complicated, but it depends on the exact model.
SSD and increase the ram.
Max out the RAM then replace HD with Solid State Drive
replacing the hard drive with an SSD will make most difference. Then add more RAM if you need to.
I've never bothered doing clean installs on any of my macs.
So... I'm sat at my iMac now and turns out that it's mid-2011 as well. It was a cheapo buy from work but still runs decently quickly, though start-up is slow compared to my MacBook Pro with a SSD.
I am running 24GB of RAM though and I think your 4GB of RAM will be struggling with the latest operating system. You'd be better off with 8GB or maybe even 16 if you're running the likes of Photoshop.
It's dead easy to fit, see this guide.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+EMC+2428+RAM+Replacement/5660
I've used RAM from Crucial - http://uk.crucial.com - on several Macs over the years and never had a problem with it. They also have a neat tool which makes sure you get the right RAM for your Mac.
Given that it's really easy to do, Id be tempted to try that before investing in a SSD. It may be that it speeds things up enough to make it useable again without the drive swap.
A propos of which, how much spare disk space do you have? If your hard drive is almost full it'll slow things down noticeably as well, so it may be worth doing some housekeeping and either deleting or archiving stuff you're not using.
No doubt at all that the SSD upgrade would make the biggest difference.
I've a 27" Core 2 Duo from 2009 with only 4GB RAM ... but I switched the HD to an SSD a few years ago and it's still pretty capable. It feels as snappy as my work's MacBook Pro (2015, i5, 8GB, SSD) despite having the lates version of Mac OS and still only 4GB!
I followed an online guide but had to buy some suckers to take the screen out and fit the HD, it wasn't overly complicated.