Painfully slow mac

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Level 1

11 points

Painfully slow mac

Hi, I hope someone can help. I stopped using my mac about a year ago because it became painfully slow. I decided to try and sort the problem. I have cleaned it up and cleared anything not needed, pretty much starting from new, but it still seems to take forever to open anything, took over 4 minutes for safari to open this morning and i get the coloured spinning wheel for every function i try and do. I have 1TB drive and have used 741.6gb of it. I no computer whizz and don't understand everything but i can follow instructions well, so if anybody has any solutions i'd be really really grateful. It just seems such a waste to have a imac and not be able to use it. It is all up to date with Monterey. Please can anyone help sort this out once and for all. Many thanks

iMac 21.5″, macOS 12.2

Posted on Mar 11, 2022 2:07 AM

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Answer 1

Jack-19

Level 8

46,008 points

Mar 11, 2022 7:03 AM in response to rugbykay

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities.

I believe we need to proceed with an EtreCheck report. EtreCheck is a useful App to diagnose and identify issues, both hardware and software. It is trusted by many users. Please follow the steps outlined below:

Navigate to: https://etrecheck.com and get the free version of EtreCheckPro.
Download it. It is a free and trusted app. It is often recommended here on Apple Support Communities.
Open EtreCheck, and before running the report, be sure to check “Allow full Drive Access” at the bottom of the EtreCheckPro window.
Run the report, and put it in a post, as shown here: How to use the Add Text Feature When Post… - Apple Community. We will then examine the report for issues in your Mac.

Jack

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Answer 2

padams35

Level 4

3,445 points

Mar 15, 2022 9:49 AM in response to rugbykay

Your first problem is the 5400rpm HDD. Those do not play nice with APFS (Catalina and newer).

Your second problem is CleanMyMac. Its over-hyped at best and a scareware scam at worse which in practice makes slow macs even slower. Uninstall!

In fact, if you can I'd suggest making a clean install of MacOS onto an external USB 3.0 SSD and switch to booting from that.

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Answer 3

rugbykay Author

Level 1

11 points

Mar 15, 2022 8:34 AM in response to Jack-19

Thank you for your help and sorry for the late response. Here is my et recheck report. Hoping someone can help as it's all gobbledegook to me. TIA

Etrecheck report

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Answer 4

padams35

Level 4

3,445 points

Mar 15, 2022 10:21 AM in response to rugbykay

The clean install is easy: Just restart into recovery mode (command-r startup key combo) and then select the external drive as the install target. (If necessary you may need to first reformat the external drive as APFS using Disk Utility)

How to reinstall macOS - Apple Support

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

To change your startup drive see: Change your Mac startup disk - Apple Support

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Answer 5

padams35

Level 4

3,445 points

Mar 11, 2022 6:34 AM in response to rugbykay

Did you get a model with the pure 1TB HDD? (Not fusion or SSD?) If so that 2.5" 5400rpm HDD drive is your performance bottleneck. The average user has found those drives unusable slow with Catalina and newer versions of MacOS.

Fortunately there is an easy fix: buy an external USB SSD, reinstall MacOS onto the external drive, and switch to using the external SSD as your startup boot volume.

(If your iMac has a Fusion Drive or SSD then I'd suggest running Etrecheck to test for problems).

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