Mrs asbrooks has a 2017 iMac, a 2.3Ghz Dual-Core i5 with 8GB of memory and 1 TB SSD.

It runs really slowly, slow to start up and generally slow in use and I can’t tell why. She really only runs the Google chrome browser to access her college trusts Microsoft 365 account which she runs the online office apps.

On occasion she’ll get a popup saying that it is low on memory. Activity monitor doesn’t give me much to go on, running the Activity monitor uses the highest resource at about 5%. The machine at idle uses about 4 of the 8GB of memory and the SSD has about 450GB free space on the drive. I have even installed clean my Mac to try to improve the performance, which it does do for a couple of hours.

Is it the case that it is under powered for what she is doing? Given that the windows laptop issued to her has a lesser spec CPU and memory I would have thought it should be ok.

It’s a massive cause of upset in our household so any hints will be very much appreciated

Thanks

make sure you’re backed up (of course!) then check the SSD for errors
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/disk-utility/dskutl1040/mac

I’d also check the “Login Items” from Settings to make sure it’s not loading any background tasks you don’t want during startup.

As above disc issues are often the cause. My aging Mac Air I am writing this on has a 1.1Ghz i5, 8G ram and does what you need admirably. It can also edit video, do graphics/photos etc. etc.

If it makes you feel better I bought a brand new PC (yeah I know, sorry) the other week for work with similar specs to your Mac that couldn’t even run its own operating system satisfactorily, let alone run an app too. It went back and was replaced by a similar spec machine from another manufacturer that works fine. Normally you avoid such silliness with Macs as its all tightly controlled, but sometimes hardware errors do happen.

Have you tried a PRAM / SMC / NVRAM reset?

https://www.avg.com/en/signal/reset-mac-pram-nvram-smc

It’s old and Chrome is resource intensive on a Mac.

Safari would probably run a bit faster, but IMV it’s likely that she’s coming up for new computer time.

If all the files are backed up – I would format it & re-install.

What OS is it running? It should take at least Ventura

If you’re planning on keeping it for a while more, then it’s definitely worth upgrading the Ram. My slightly older i7 iMac ran much, much better with 16gb.

I have a 2012 iMac (albeit with a 3.4 GHz quad core i7 & 24 Gb RAM) and it runs perfectly OK, so I’d be surprised if a 2017 model is struggling.

Any reason why she’s running Office through a browser? I would have thought installing the native apps would give a much better experience.

I’d try more RAM I think. Although 8Gb is fine on the M-chip machines, the older intel ones are much less happy with only 8 Gb.

I have even installed clean my Mac to try to improve the performance, which it does do for a couple of hours.

Danger flag here. I don’t know the software specifically, but generally on a Mac any of these “make your machine run quicker” apps generally do more harm then good. They are simply not needed.

Chrome is terrible for hogging resources – try Safari or Firefox.

Also try leaving it on – if you are shutting down every day it doesn’t get chance to do background housekeeping stuff.

But browsers can be deal breakers – if Office 365 has got be accessed through the browser the version you are able to run may not support it (or not support it well). And there’s nothing you can do as the OS dictates which browser version you can run.

Get the office apps installed. Get her to login to her Microsoft 365 account in the browser, click ‘home’ top left, click “install and more” top right.

I’d try more RAM I think.

yes, you can definitely do this & it will help but it isn’t the root cause of the problem I think!

Mrs asbrooks has a 2017 iMac, a 2.3Ghz Dual-Core i5 with 8GB of memory and 1 TB SSD.p

have you upgraded the SSD since new? If not, pretty sure this is the the base-spec 21.5″ iMac – it wouldn’t have come with a 1TB SSD from new, it’ll be a Fusion drive, which were terrible even then and probably **** now!! So if this is the case I’d definitely (after backing up!!) look at replacing that ASAP with a proper SSD.

have you upgraded the SSD since new? If not, pretty sure this is the the base-spec 21.5″ iMac – it wouldn’t have come with a 1TB SSD from new, it’ll be a Fusion drive, which were terrible even then and probably **** now!! So if this is the case I’d definitely (after backing up!!) look at replacing that ASAP with a proper SSD.

Good spot. An internal 1Tb SSD would have been big money so I would agree it’s more likely a fusion drive. Upgrading an internal drive in an iMac is not for the fainthearted, but the good news is that an external SSD connected by USB2 is still miles faster than an internal fusion drive so is a worthwhile upgrade (it’s what I did when my fusion drive started spitting its dummy out).

Nail on the head there, get the Fusion Drive replaced.

Whilst you’re there you can do a fresh OS install and install the office apps.
Should restore marital bliss and get a good few more years out of the mac. Another 8gb stick of ram would be wise if you’re going under the hood.

If you’re not comfortable doing the above I’d wager that paying someone to do it would still be money well spent.

A 1TB SSD would have been a very expensive upgrade – as Zilog says, it will be a Fusion Drive. These are a small-ish SSD linked to a spinning disc hard drive with proprietary Apple software/hardware.

Unlike @Zilog6128 I don’t think they’re terrible – they give loads of storage and SSD like speed. Pretty magical really.

However, hard drives usually have a life of about 5 years and yours is much older than that. I had one with the same symptoms. I’d go with 90% certainty that the disc has failed. This won’t show up properly in any of the disk utilities or tools Apple provide, but it will if you take it to an Apple Store and get them to run their diagnostics. I had Apple replace the spinning disc on mine in 2019 and it was £192 (the ssd part was fine)

Agree with all the above. Also definitely agree with a clean OSX install. Even if you just did that it should make a decent difference. But the (lack of) SSD and Chrome will be the big issues (and also the fact it needs a reformat)

Just put a new SSD in our 2013 27″ iMac at the weekend.

Bought the kit from ifixit.com and it was very easy. Although I still had to create a Cortana install image on a USB to rebuild the thing once it booted with a blank SSD.

Thanks for all your replies. It seams that I have wider things to consider.

I’m not shy of opening these things up to work on them. I upgraded an older Macbook Pro several years ago by adding a SSD and more RAM & if it were mine then I would probably do the same to the iMac myself.

To begin with though, I’ll do a reinstall to see if that improves things and tell her to back it up more regularly.  Question – if it does pack up would swapping the drives over at that point be too late or could I get it going again with he the drive swap?

To answer some of the questions asked above.

It may well be a fusion drive, I had no input on what she bought (Independent woman and all that) I just suffer the consequences.

@timmys – So I can run the machine from an external drive? I might try that to see if there’s an improvement in performance. If there is then I know where the issue is and she’ll also know what the issue is.

She uses Chrome as it works better than Safari. During the early days of the lock down when she was teaching on line, she was doing so via a remote desktop which didn’t work very well with Safari. I’ll get her to try firefox.

We had the office suite on the installed locally at one point. She works for two separate employers which for some reason has messed up the licensing on the our office suite, meaning the files opened locally could not be edited.

Anyway she won’t let me take it apart so whatever happens it’ll have to go back to the Apple shop. She’s not interested in using an independent technician.

Thanks again. Here’s to a quieter life.

I’ve replaced the Fusion drives in a couple of friends iMacs (older than yours) in recent months with SSDs. It was transformative.

One thing to do before anything else; create a new user profile (make it an admin one), login to that and see if it seems faster on the new profile.

BTW, I doubt that running MacOS from a USB connected drive will result in sparkling performance.

So I can run the machine from an external drive?

yes, this will make it obvious if it’s the internal drive that has a problem!

https://support.apple.com/en-us/101578

BTW, I doubt that running MacOS from a USB connected drive will result in sparkling performance.

probably better than a dying Fusion drive though!! (if that is indeed the problem)

if it does pack up would swapping the drives over at that point be too late or could I get it going again with he the drive swap?

no you could still do it, but would definitely have to manually re-install the OS as someone mentioned doing above.

@timmys – So I can run the machine from an external drive?

Yes. It’s perfectly acceptable – considerably better than the fusion drive. I’ve replaced drives in most macs I’ve owned – laptops with 100’s of tiny screws I’m fine with, but heat guns to melt glue to remove screens to get inside an iMac is beyond my personal risk vs reward parameters.

Also, anecdote is not data etc. but I’ve always found re-installing the OS has bugger all affect on speed unless something is seriously screwed up. Reinstalling the OS as preventative maintenance definitely seems to be more of a Windows thing.

I’m running an imac with an external SSD drive for the OS and everything. It makes an absolutely enormous difference to the original fusion drive and even an idiot like me can set it up in no time

Heres the Apple bumph on how to do it….

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250003583

I’m using a SanDisk 2TB SSD drive via a USB-C cable. Well… I’m running two. One for the OS, one for the Time Machine back-up