Hi everyone, I PM'd Tom about this but I'd like to hear from other Mac users. I'm going to be helping out a family member with a Mac that's running really slow. What sort of things should I be looking for? I don't know the ins and outs of OSX well enough to know what to look for to speed the system up.

They're also having Time Machine backup problems (in that it stopped backing up), but I don't really know what's going on there so I won't ask for help with that one yet

Thanks for any advice, I'm still trying to learn Macs.

What kind of Mac, what age or model code?

Is the hard drive full?

What is it being used for?

Honestly, I don't even know. They're using it in their office for just general stuff. Nothing heavy I don't think.

XXXXX is too slow? Replace the mechanical drive with an SSD.

And maybe fix the other issues afterward. But doing the drive replacement first will save you time while poking at the rest!

Cheers

I agree, but first get the backups working. And actually do a Time Machine full backup. Might even do another to an external USB drive.

Then you can install the blank new SSD and restore from backup. I like the Crucial brand SSD but there are others that also work well.

If the slowness is due to misbehaving software, this article has some first steps to try. Creating a new user account and seeing how it performs is a good one overall. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201516

But before you do that, make sure you have a complete backup of everything important. The last two macs in my house that "got slow" eventually ended up with dead hard drives -- and Apple's diagnostic hardware was useless as tits on a bull for... well... diagnosing the problem prior to their death.

And if you can't get Time Machine working quickly, use SuperDuper to clone the drive.

Also excellent advice on Windows.

Ok guys, I'm pretty sure I found the culprit, and I think it was a virus.

I spent a good amount of time in Activity Monitor trying to see if anything was taking up too many resources. They use Chrome which I know is pretty notorious for memory leaks on OSX (and Windows sometimes), but while the Mac seemed to be maxing out its physical RAM, the pressure was still well in the green (this was Mavericks).

So while I was doing other things like working on the Time Machine issue (turned out to be super simple, it was pointing at a device that wasn't there anymore), I suddenly noticed an entry at the top of the memory usage list, and it started sucking up memory. Within about 20 seconds the memory pressure was pegged at the maximum, which this entry called "appOS" was running out of control and the whole computer started seizing. A quick search led me to believe that the computer was infected, making it the first Mac I've come across that had a virus (I know it's not novel, but I don't work on a lot of Macs).

I was able to clean it off and get it running perfectly smoothly again.

Thanks for the advice, though. I'll use it going forward. Unfortunately, on this particular model, which ended up being a late 2013 iMac 21.5", the general consensus on the web was that these are a nightmare for memory upgrades, so I wasn't about to touch that. I'd rather not do an SSD either.

Wow. It's not often that a computer slowness problem *really* turns out to be a virus. I mean, that's what everyone always says for every computer problem: "Run a virus scan", and it's never a virus. The second most common answer: "Defrag the hard disk" is also never the culprit. So this is pretty novel.

Lol too true. I'd estimate that other than viruses, 9 out of 10 of my clients assume the same two causes for their slow computers:

1) "does it need to be defragged?"

2) "does my [wife/husband] have too much 'stuff' on there?"

I've had over 100 conversations about how 1GB of Word docs and 20GB of photos are not slowing down their computer, especially when their hard drive is 90% free space.

*edit*

However, I should note that I've seen a handful of computers where free space actually was one of the culprits. It's a fun kind of challenge to work on a computer with 20MB free...

Mavericks is OS X 10.9, which is 2, soon to be 3 major versions behind. May want to advise them to take the free update to El Captain (10.11) and the soon to be released Sierra (10.12). Mavericks will likely fall off the supported list for receiving security updates when Sierra comes out in a month or two.

Also, double check the security settings. The malware (not a virus) got in somehow via a user initiated action. Sadly a lot of bad advice exists out there to disable Gatekeeper, which basically lets malware run free on the platform. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491 has more info on this system.

Thanks, Tom. I advised upgrading, but they're scared of the new interface. I don't much like the UI changes either (mostly the full screen app stuff), but I agree that they should get up to date.

Looks like the cutoff for 10.9 getting security updates has now happened. Today's very important update is only being made available for 10.10 and 10.11.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207130

This one is what was being exploited on the iPhone by some government malware to spy on specific targets. With the fixes out now, odds are this will transition to the more widely used malware quickly to target those not up to date or intentionally holding back on the major OS upgrades.

The only concern with updating is that with every OSX update, my macs run even slower, markedly with every update between Snow Leopard and Mavericks.

Definitely do the solid state upgrade. I did it on my mid-2010 MBP and turned a machine that was frustratingly close to unusable to quite adequate again. Just remember that not all solid state drives are created equal. I've had great success with Samsung drives in Macs, but one time tried an OCZ Vertex drive because I got a screaming deal on it and it turned out to be hardly faster than the old Winchester drive.

I'll think about it. Replacing the drive in this iMac is tough because it's one of the slim ones. I've heard it's really easy in the thicker models, but you have to split the screen from the adhesive holding it down, and then reapply it when you put the screen back. iFixit sells all the parts I might need, but at a certain point it gets to be a pretty expensive upgrade for "quite adequate" results. I think they'll probably just get a new iMac eventually.

Also, I get that Apple is good at moving onward and upward with their software, but are they really leaving a three year old OS behind so quickly? That seems almost irresponsible to me. I know I'm coming from the Windows world, where products are supported for forever, often to the detriment of the product its self, but still...

An alternative to replacing the drive inside the iMac would be to attach an SSD to the Thunderbolt port. OS X and the Mac firmware don't really care if a drive is external or internal in most cases for booting.

On the OS patch side, Apple sees it more based on what hardware they are dropping support for. The security patch released this week runs on all the hardware that was capable of installing OS X 10.8. The minimum hardware requirements for the OS are identical between 10.8 through 10.11. Hardware cutoffs tend to start at 5 years old, Apple's transition to vintage. It's almost certain the hardware will see a loss of OS support/patches by the time it hits obsolete at 7 years. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624

In Windows terms, it's similar to how Microsoft doesn't release updates for Windows 8 anymore, however they do for the new OS they released a year later, 8.1. Any machine capable of running 8 is capable of running 8.1. Just as any Mac capable of running 10.8 is capable of running 10.11.

That would be great! But what should I use for a thunderbolt hard drive? I haven't seen those around and I don't really see enclosures either. How do I tell the computer to boot to the external drive instead?


I don't think that's a very direct comparison. 8.1 is a weird standout in the Windows lineage, and I viewed it as more of a Windows update that future updates were dependent on, like service packs. Apple moved to this "we're calling every version 10 from now on" quite some time ago, so to be analogous Microsoft would have had to end support for 7, and they even still support Vista for another few months.

Like I said, there's good and bad aspects to the way both companies handle this area. What I dislike about how both of them will be handling things going forward (and Apple has been doing for a while now) is that security and interface are intertwined, and you have little choice but to accept the new changes or incur risk. It's an annoyance that I dislike about mobile operating systems in particular, and cloud services in general. If you don't like a new UI element, tough luck!

But at least Apple gives you some time to prepare yourself. I'm not looking forward to the first time Microsoft overhauls Windows 10 and forces the upgrade on everyone. We'll have a Vista/8 operating system on our hands, but this we won't have the option of skipping it!

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204417

Thanks Tom! What drive would you recommend? I'm having trouble finding lightning drives.

Ok, so I've spent about an hour now looking around at drives for this iMac, and here's what I've concluded: I'm going to recommend a USB 3 drive.

I'm surprised how few options there are in the Thunderbolt SSD space. It's pretty much this drive and that's it. The problem is that it's about twice as much as I can get for SSD drives and an enclosure.

I briefly thought about suggesting a Samsung SSD and throwing it into an enclosure, bringing a 500GB drive replacement to roughly $173. Then I thought I might just recommend one of those fancy new tiny Samsung SSDs for $192.

I have to compare that to the $450 Lacie drive, and it just doesn't seem worth it. But is there something I'm not considering? It seems to me that USB 3 has plenty of throughput, but are there other disadvantages?

ps- I have to say, I'm certainly impressed with the disk management features of OSX. Doing this kind of thing in Windows is not nearly as simple.

No opinions, I guess.

Similarly, I'm trying to figure out how to upgrade my mother's Mac Mini, and I don't have a lot of options. It only has USB 2.0 (which isn't nearly fast enough), Firewire 800 (still too slow), and Thunderbolt. But now I'm back to the cost problem. The only Thunderbolt drives I can find cost almost as much as a new Mac Mini! I'd rather replace the whole computer.

The only other option I can think of is to use a Thunderbolt adapter to USB 3, then attach the drive I linked in my previous post to that. Is there any chance that would work reliably?

Just try a USB2 SSD on that Mac Mini. The results could be quite enlightening.

An advantage of USB stuff, is that it will also work on any other computer out there, not just Apple stuff or the latest 2016/2017 stuff from other vendors.

Useful for data recovery etc.

USB 2 is really fast enough?

Try it. With an SSD in a USB 2/3 enclosure. You're probably getting one anyway for use with the other system, so you can experiment with it on this one (or on a USB2 port/hub on the other one). The performance may surprise you.

Just getting an SSD in there will speed things up immensely, reducing seek times to zero. Most mechanical drive I/O delays are due to seek times, so..

Cheers

Sorry to bring up an old thread, but I'm going to be doing this soon. Thanks for the instructions, Tom, but there's one problem with them: they explain how to boot to an external device with a fresh install of OSX. It doesn't say anything about migrating the existing OS to an external device. How is that done? It must be possible. I recall that I migrated to an SSD on my own MacBook years ago, but that was for a drive swap. Not an external device. I assume that the instructions above would still apply, but that part in the middle where they redirect to another page of instructions for installing OSX from a recovery partition would instead involve copying the system over to the new drive...

Thanks for the help.

No need for cloning software or manually copying anything. Follow the steps for a clean install to the external drive,

Then when setup is mostly done, Migration Assistant will run. Pick the first option which includes "startup disk". That means any startup disk visible to the machine including another hard drive with a valid install and user data.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204350

Doesn't it make more sense to boot to recovery and use Disk Utility to clone to the external drive? Seems like fewer steps to me and shorter work time.

In my initial reply, I was considering the history of the machine having had malware on it, and not running an OS version that fully protects system files or modern malware threats on the macOS side.

There's also the issue of cloning in Disk Utility or other tools potentially not bringing over a recovery partition which would block certain features from being used such as Filevault.