Archived Thread

NFT: Help With My Imac

Samiam : 7/26/2015 1:19 pm

The Imac gets that spinning ball over and over and has become very slow. I updated to Yosemite and have 4 MGs of memory. My hard drive is ok per disk utilities and is not full. I have a ton of music and Itunes is always playing something but the music is stored on an external hard drive.

I opened Activity Monitor and 3 items seemed way higher than the others in the CPU Time. They are WSDaemeon, Kernel_task and Window Server. I googled all 3 and don't understand what they do but it seems I should not be doing anything with them. At the bottom of Activity Monitor is System which always shows a negative percentage.

Everything is very slow whether its the web, Itunes, Excel, etc. For what it's worth, I have Webroot Secure Anywhere which shows no virus or malaware and this also take a very long time for a scan.

I'm not a techie or an exotic user. Any help would be appreciated. The Imac is about 7 years old and I'm wondering if it needs to be replaced.

I would think its a failing harddrive

mattlawson : 7/26/2015 2:28 pm : link

Relatively inexpensive repair. Do you know anyone with an IT Background that can do the work for you?

Have you used Disk Utility to

Peter from NH (formerly CT) : 7/26/2015 2:36 pm : link

Verify (and possibly repair) the disk permissions and verify the startup disk? I have found that usually helps. If not I would take it to the genius bar at an apple store and have them run some diagnostics. They are usually very helpful (even on an old Mac).

My wife's was doing the same thing after about 7 yrs

Jon : 7/26/2015 2:43 pm : link

She uses it for work done couldn't risk the HD failing on her so she bought a new one. Good luck with yours

Your own disk utility will not be able to diagnose its own demise

mattlawson : 7/26/2015 3:41 pm : link

I'd have it backup up before it does fail, if indeed that is the issue-- which it probably is.

Check your disk space ...?

short lease : 7/26/2015 5:56 pm : link

My friend owns a Mac (I don't) and she was complaining about the same thing. We briefly examined her computer and found that she had 2 gigs of available space left on a 120 gig drive. After she cleaned it up (deleted tons of files she did not need anymore) to about 40 gigs available - her computer behaved MUCH quicker/better.

Is 4 gigs of RAM enough now-a-days? You might consider doubling it (at least).

Sorry -

short lease : 7/26/2015 5:58 pm : link

thought you said 4 gigs of RAM ... 4 megs seem way to small.

There's no way it's 4 megs

mattlawson : 7/26/2015 7:40 pm : link

If you have 4 megs of space left in your HD yes it would behave that way. Beach ball of death

RE: There's no way it's 4 megs

short lease : 7/26/2015 10:40 pm : link

In comment 12386685 mattlawson said:

Quote:

If you have 4 megs of space left in your HD yes it would behave that way. Beach ball of death

I just assumed he was talking about RAM (because of the low number). If he is talking about disk space .... he is in big trouble. You better get that straightened out asap Sam.

7 years old

jawebb20 : 7/27/2015 12:22 am : link

I think we found our answer.

Unless you backup your imac, and do a complete wipe and import your important files, you're stuck with it being slow.

7 years is pretty good life on it, i'd sell it in working condition while it still functions and just buy a new one.

WSDaemon

Ron from Ninerland : 7/27/2015 5:16 am : link

WSDaemon IS webroot secure and it is known to be a memory hog. kerneltask and windowsserver are normal Mac processes, there's nothing you can do about them.

That being said 4 Gb or RAM is pretty low these days. You probably also have an old spinning hard drive. Sounds like you're ready for a new machine. If you do want to hang on to the old one, the best upgrade you can do would be to go to 8 Gb of RAM. Should cost a couple of hundred installed from an authorized Apple repair shop.

IMHO webroot is useless. It wouldn't hurt you to lose that.

Webroot

Samiam : 7/27/2015 12:51 pm : link

Thanks Ron. I turned off the Webroot and it seems much better. I'll probably run a scan once or twice a week but leaving it on all the time is really affecting the Imac performance. Activity Monitor is still showing high numbers for the items including WSDaemon and System is still negative but I'm not getting the spinning ball.

I had upgraded the machine from 2 to 4 GBs but I think 4 was the maximum. Thanks for all the help.