slooooooow iMac

[Strandville]

hi folks, seeking advice for my iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2012) running 8gb ddr3 ram. The machine has become barely useable it is so slow. I understand upgrading the ram on tis series iMac is quite daunting but Im confident enough if I need to I can do just that, but I feel the issue may well lie with the HD rather than ram (I know Ram would help though) my initial thoughts are to change the HD to an SSD drive in the hope that this would alleviate some of the issues Im having, would anyone advise if this is a good idea or am I barking up the wrong tree. I run a small home printing business and running Photoshop can be highly tedious , any help much appreciated. Thanks

 

[pkcable]

I have seen kits advertised. iFixit has a kit with a 250GB SSD for about 100 bucks. Might be worth it, or you might want to upgrade that IS an 8 year old computer.

 

[bakron1]

I had a couple of older iMacs I used in my office I thought about upgrading and realized the cost of the components and the labor to upgrade them was about the same as I could go out and buy a clean newer used machine for.

 

[Just_Me_D]

hi folks, seeking advice for my iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2012) running 8gb ddr3 ram. The machine has become barely useable it is so slow. I understand upgrading the ram on tis series iMac is quite daunting but Im confident enough if I need to I can do just that, but I feel the issue may well lie with the HD rather than ram (I know Ram would help though) my initial thoughts are to change the HD to an SSD drive in the hope that this would alleviate some of the issues Im having, would anyone advise if this is a good idea or am I barking up the wrong tree. I run a small home printing business and running Photoshop can be highly tedious , any help much appreciated. Thanks

Your iMac with 8 GBs of Adam should still be quite speedy, depending on your processor and HD speed. If you have an i5 processor then I would agree that the issue lies with the HD. Swapping it out for an SSD could very well provide a boost in speed, in my opinion.

 

[iN8ter]

I have seen kits advertised. iFixit has a kit with a 250GB SSD for about 100 bucks. Might be worth it, or you might want to upgrade that IS an 8 year old computer.

I tried to upgrade my Late 2013 iMac and the screen completely spiderwebbed while cutting the tape. $600 to fix it, so I just took out the RAM and used teh SSD to upgrade another machine and threw the iMac in the trash.

Not worth risking that repair. Use an external HDD enclosure and put an SSD in it, boot off of that.

I didn't really care about my iMac, since I had already basically replaced it with a new PC, anyways. That's the only reason why I risked the repair.

2012 model may have a non-laminate screen, which makes the repair a LOT less risky - since cracking the glass won't completely destroy the entire display

The machine is going to be slow. It's really quite old, now, and pretty much all of the components in there are slow. I don't think you are going to recover much performance from the SSD. The CPU is probably getting exposed by recent software packages (and newer macOS releases).

 

[Lee_Bo]

I acquired a 2011 iMac that still worked but was slightly on the slow side.

On a whim, I decided to upgrade the ram to 16 gigs (four 4-gig sticks under a door on the bottom of the display) and then decided to replace the original HD with an SSD and then did a OEM install of the original MacOS and upgraded to High Sierra (I think that's as far as it would upgrade). Those upgrades were exactly with the iMac needed and I'm typing this on that very machine right now. Still use it daily.

 

[Strandville]

I've added an external SSD drive to the Mac and installed the os on it, it's currently connected via USB 3 and thunderbolt 3 on the drive enclosure, the difference in speed is considerable. I believe this will increase quite a bit if the drive is attached fully using the thunderbolt connection but apple are charging extortionate amount for a thunderbolt 2 to thunderbolt 3 lead. I intend running the Mac for a bit in the current setup with the view of fitting SSD internally, thanks for the input to wall who replied.

 

[Strandville]

The difference in speed is considerable.

 

[Just_Me_D]

I've added an external SSD drive to the Mac and installed the os on it, it's currently connected via USB 3 and thunderbolt 3 on the drive enclosure, the difference in speed is considerable. I believe this will increase quite a bit if the drive is attached fully using the thunderbolt connection but apple are charging extortionate amount for a thunderbolt 2 to thunderbolt 3 lead. I intend running the Mac for a bit in the current setup with the view of fitting SSD internally, thanks for the input to wall who replied.

Awesome, and thank you for the update.

 

[Strandville]

I've had the full version of clean my Mac since I first got the iMac, hard drive space isn't an issue. I've 2tyrabyte of hard drive one internal one external . The SSD has made considerable improvements to the Mac . Thanks for the input.

 

[JojoKalma71]

well Yes it is already weak for this it is an Apple that ages faster than other iron! only replacement with a newer one!