I have not had to troubleshoot a wonky Mac in many years........

[Onamuji]

1. Any Mac from mid-2012 or earlier that's running Yosemite will benefit from disabling transparency effects in the Finder. Can get as much as a 20-30% speed boost in the Finder just by going into System Preferences > Accessibility and toggling that setting.

2. Hard drives tend to go in year #4 and beyond. Beachballing is frequently the earliest symptom of a failing hard drive. Do a SMART check with SMART Utilty.

[Robert M]

Space,

Yups! Missed that line. I had to wake up a bit too early yesterday to deal with a tsunami of baby poo and it took its toll on me! - lol!

Robert

[GGD]

Robert M wrote:
Space,

Yups! Missed that line. I had to wake up a bit too early yesterday to deal with a tsunami of baby poo and it took its toll on me! - lol!

Robert

Have you tried doing a complete wipe, and then a clean install of the diaper. But that might just be a temporary fix.

Hope you catch up on sleep.

[Robert M]

GGD,

I was in the process of doing that when the second and third waves hit. Then it began to rain... Mackenfrackenfrickenfracken!

Robert

[JPK]

Update,

Ran Techtool Pro. Optimized, defragged, etc.

Repaired permissions

Check SMART utility and disk shows OK.

Disabled transparency and a couple of other little tricks.

NO HELP. Lots of spinning beach balls and bouncing icons from the dock. I am returning it to my friend tonight with a full backup on a spare 1TB drive (they never did any backups, so just doing one is a huge good thing). I am also including another drive formatted to DOS in case they want to off load for transfer to a PC.

They have 5 user accounts on this and I only had the PW info for the Admin/Main user. I would have liked to have more time to ad a new user to see if the symptoms followed, but she needs it back whether is is slow or not.

She is a PC girl - and was never a big fan of Macs. Her husband "made her" get the mac and is now thinking of just getting a PC and call it a day.

I have offered to take the iMac off their hands for the right price. I would install a new SSD drive, more ram and do a fresh OS install. I have a feeling this will be a rocket ship then! I would say goodbye to my trusty old Powermac!

JPK

[jdc]

You know, the Apple store will look at it for FREE, just make an appointment. Doesnt matter where they bought it or when or anything.

Sorry, still sticking to my guns -- doing all that other stuff was a waste of your time.

Nuke and pave.

And yes, with a SSD and some more ram its a pretty great mac.