Time to call Apple on new iMac slowness?

[StingMe]

[quote GGD]Also, have you run Activity Monitor (in the Utilities Folder), set it to sort by % CPU and show All Processes, and see what's using the most. Maybe you have some app or driver that's sucking up all of the CPU time.
"Activity monitor does not explain it." from http://forums.macresource.com/read/1/474053/474331 (background info on this particular issue)

[jdc]

dude -- something is horribly wrong -- and i would be pissed at you too

you should have reinstalled immediately

i would do 2 of the suggestions here

1) try a new user -- see how long it takes to start them

2) reinstall CS2 -- no, it wont break her project -- but it will delete her preferences -- which may be none -- like saved Document Preset or custom PDF presets -- but it sounds like if her project is almost done, neither of those will affect her (if she even uses them, since 99% of ID users dont)

you should have posted a long time ago

and calling apple wont help, they wont diagnose an adobe issue

that mac should be fine with CS 2 -- not as fast as CS 3, but still plenty fast

[ka jowct]

that mac should be fine with CS 2 -- not as fast as CS 3, but still plenty fast

What he said. I've played with CS2 apps on machines in the Apple store. Perfectly acdeptable performance. Something else is wrong in that system.

[freescotland]

Reinstalled CS2, no difference, still dog slow.

Essentially running CS2 Suite, MS Office 2004 (runs ok), Toast 8 and the iLife, iWork stuff.

What else could be wrong with the system.

When the job is printed I can reinstall the entire system from scratch I suppose, but not today.

I have done the single user fsck and run disk utility and disk warrior again.

Any other guesses? I am on hold with apple now.

[mikebw]

Until you can isolate the operating system as a source of the problem you won't be able to figure out the real cause. If you had an external drive you could boot from that could really help get started.

In my experience very slow system performance is always somehow related to the hard drive. Is your drive especially full, like more than 90% of capacity? Again, I would suggest that the drive is actually faulty, maybe not broken yet (hopefully) but well on the way out.

Have you checked the S.M.A.R.T. status on the drive?

[Article Accelerator]

From your previous thread:

"It has three gigs of ram (added a 2 from OWC...Random crashes"

- Go back to the original RAM only
- Erase (or reformat) the internal HD
- Install Leopard, fully update it, and repair permissions
- Let it complete its indexing and other housekeeping tasks

- restart

If you now find it's fast and stable--and I think you will--you know where to look for the culprits...