Recently bought iMac is too slow

since it's been less than 1 year, if it was bought new it is still under warranty.

please see information on apple warranty

also see contacting apple

right off the bat i see two issues that would cause slowness.

#1 is that your hard drive appears to be failing.

#2 you have a rotational hard drive that is painfully slow.

it may be time for repairs. if you are going to get service, i would recommend upgrading the HDD with an SSD.

edit: something i missed in the etrecheck report is that it is a newer machine. if it's still under warranty, contact apple about the failing hard drive.

ronasara,

i do agree that she could use more ram. but with performance numbers that low (shown below), along with etrecheck saying the drive appears to be failing, adding ram would be a fool's errand. to up the ram and not address the hdd would waste her time and money.

if the drive was OK, she should see around five times that read speed. even with only 8GB ram.

Britt, you also only have 8 GB of RAM. Not enough. Today's environment requires a minimum of 16 GB RAM, and more is better. You can be assured that with so little RAM and an old slow mechanical drive, even if it's working, you will have a painfully slow computer if you are doing anything beyond email and internet surfing.

Fellow user etresoft, creator of EtreCheck, has noted in other topics that a failed hard drive notice doesn't necessarily mean what it says. Especially in a case like this. What he says happens with such slow drives is the app expects certain tests to finish in xxx amount of time. A glacially slow hard drive such as what's in your Mac ends up making EtreCheck think the drive is failing because it takes so long to complete the test.

Purchasing the most basic model of any type of computer, Mac or Windows, is never a good investment. Base models are designed to save you the most money at the expense of just barely having the ability to run.

I fully agree with you. I wasn't meaning to suggest increasing the RAM without addressing the main issue, the failing HD. But it's good that you made that clear. Thank you.