iMac 23" Desktop Bogged Down Daily

[Dev]

Afternoon everyone!

I'm back with more frustration. Some time ago I posted about my computer bogging down and running very slowly on a daily basis, and was introduced to the wonderful world of maintenance apps. A weekly tweak with those and I was absolutely fine for quite a while. Lately, however, if my computer has been asleep for a lengthy period of time it's very slow to wake up and nothing moves faster than a snail's pace after that.

My present solution to this is to run OnyX on a daily basis, which I'm sure you can imagine gets tiresome when I have things to do. A simple reboot doesn't fix the issue.

Complicating matters is that this started when Microsoft Office ran an update. I've found that when things go slow, it's most often kicked off by Outlook no longer responding. About half the time, forcing Outlook to quit fixes the issue, but that's not really a viable solution because I kind of have to keep an eye on my email.

So, short of running OnyX every day, is there anything the community here would recommend I do?

Thanks for your time!

 

[honestone]

Sorry you are having issues. I can try and provide some suggestions, and hopefully they will help.

First, while Onyx is an excellent tool, there are still some additional things you can do. One of them is to do as much disk cleanup on your own as you can. For example, if you download an update for a program (and I assume you store them somewhere), get rid of the prior version. Another thing is to look inside your downloads folder. Folks tend to neglect doing that, and it can get kind of "full".

Secondly, I also use Office 2016, but I use only Outlook, Word, and Excel. I do not let Microsoft automatically update each module when a new version comes out. I always go to the applicable Microsoft update page (I always post that information whenever I make a post about an update to Office 2016), and download the 3 updates for each program individually, ie, the updates for Outlook, Word, and Excel. I then do the updates on my own. That has never failed me.

One aspect of Outlook 2016 (indeed any EMail client) is to have deleted EMails permanently removed. I am doing that just about every time I run Outlook to check my EMail. The process is pretty simple:

1. For an EMail you want to delete, select it, and click on delete (I suspect you know that).

2. After you do that for all the EMails you want to delete, they will be in your "Trash" folder. Click on the first one in that folder, then do a "Select All". Then, right click on the Trash folder, and one of the choices is "Empty Folder". Select that, and they are gone, permanently. (I just did that while making this post. There were 3 EMails I received in my In Box that I no longer need).

Third, it is important to perform more extended maintenance (and maybe "software" repairs) on your internal drive. Disk Utility is "not bad" for that, but it is better if one uses a more robust disk cleanup/maintenance/repair program, like Tech Tool Pro or Disk Warrior. I myself have Tech Tool Pro, and I always run it as part of my weekly disk cleanup/maintenance/repair, and backup, tasks (this is besides my daily disk cleanup task I do on my own). My weekly process consists of the following:

1. Run Onyx. The new version for High Sierra is especially slick, as one just needs to click one button, and it does a number of maintenance and cleanup tasks one by one, without any need to restart at different times.

From what I remember, the version for Sierra (I assume you have the correct version) includes Permissions Repair. Sometimes you need to run that more than once.

2. Run Tech Tool Pro. Two of its key tasks are "Volume Structures (test a volume for directory corruption)", and "Volume Rebuild (rebuild and repair a volume's directory)".

3. Run SuperDuper! for my backups.

I do that for both of my Macs, and I rarely, if ever, have issues.

Hopefully, some )or maybe all?) of that will help you.

 

[honestone]

One other thing: how much free space do you have on your internal drive?