asked on

Speed up iMac Snow Leopard

I have a 9 mo old iMac with 4GB ram, Snow Leopard. It seems REALLY slow now especially with VMWare and Parallels. Other than Activity Monitor is there any good way to find out what is slowing it down exactly? Any optimization tricks or good utilities out there that will help me out? Please don't just post links. Let me know why, etc...

Irwin W.

How much ram do you have allocated to VMWare and Parallels?

How large is your partition for VMWare or do you have a 40GB file that is used for WIndows?

RobertNZana

ASKER

I tried everywhere from 512mb to 3gb; also 1 to 2 processors. Still slow.

40gb+ if I recall.

Irwin W.

and how large is your internal drive and how much free disk space do you have?

RobertNZana

ASKER

1TB, 500GB free

Irwin W.

What is your Windows OS doing and do you need to have it running all the time?

The XP OS(I assume) should not need more than 1GB or RAM.

Can you open up your Activity monitor and sort the processes by size and post a screen grab? The same for disk activity and System memory.

RobertNZana

ASKER

It's not running all the time. I'm doing web development using asp.net/visual studio 2008. It runs very slowly.

Irwin W.

So what OS are your running and service pack level?

Do you have Antivirus installed and running?

What happens if you start the Windows OS up in safe mode? Does it run slowly as well?

RobertNZana

ASKER

XP SP3 (same thing happens with SP2 as well)

Avast AV

I can try Safe mode...

Irwin W.

OH! Also, you may want to stop spotlight from trying to scan your Windows disk and partition. The same goes for Time Machine.

RobertNZana

ASKER

Time Machine is disabled. What do you mean about spotlight?

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Irwin W.

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splait

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Irwin W.

Robert,

Any further updates?

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dalesit

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Irwin W.

So what really was the fix? one or all

RobertNZana

ASKER

It still seems to be running slow. Not sure if it's Visual Studio or the OS at this point. All the comments were good tweaks/ideas, but it really didn't address my issue completely. But thanks anyways.