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New to Mac, Slow Mini?

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Zhillsguy:
My very first Mac product, a "refurbished" late 2014 Mac Mini I5 4260U 1.4 GHz, 4 Gig, 500 gig platter drive. Runs extremely slow.

This originally came with Mojave but I never used it. I erased the disk and reinstalled the OS and it automatically upgrades to Monterey. I've searched on line but haven't found working links for backdating to Mojave, if that's the issue.

Everything seems to be fully functional, just very slow to boot and doing anything else after. Nothing seems out of the ordinary in Activity Monitor.

Installed MC without a hitch and connected to a Windows share, but haven't hooked it up to the Scarlett 6i6 yet. This will be used for audio only via USB.

1. Is this a potential hardware issue or would a prior OS make a difference?
2. Will an SSD make that much difference? I can't imagine this is how it worked new.

Thanks.

blgentry:
It's almost 2022, so an 8 year old computer with a spinning drive probably "feels very slow" by today's standards.  Importantly, in my experience, MacOS sometime around 2010 or so was really designed with SSD drives in mind.  SSDs make a shocking difference in performance on Mac.

I've recently upgraded a late 2011 Macbook Pro from a spinning drive to an SSD.  The owner was expecting good things and was not disappointed.  We went from booting in about 1:30 to booting to login in about 20 seconds.  After login another 12 seconds or so.

That said, I think MC will run just fine on this machine, as is.  It just won't feel "snappy" like a modern machine.  But put an SSD in it and everything will change.  It won't make it a 2021 computer, but it will feel very different.

Brian.

JimH:
Spinning drives aren't that slow.  An SSD is definitely faster, but you might not notice the difference unless you had a long very intensive disk access.

Zhillsguy:
Thanks gentlemen.

As-is my Rpi4 is better in every way for MC. It takes time to load even Finder. When playing MC audio, scrolling through playlists with app remotes causes stutter.

See attached screen clip, this is after running MC .94 overnight. Is 33 GB of virtual memory normal?

Edit: I see this virtual memory is the same for all processes, so may be normal?
I "closed" MC, but it still has a process going (does the mac version have a separate MC media sharing process?), I cannot bring MC back up to full screen, and it started playing RP on its own. I also have another screen clip, MC had a lot of disk activity. My library isn't that large, 43,000 or so tracks.

I haven't rebooted yet, and things are worse. I forced MC media sharing closed and re-opened MC. Now it won't close, is unresponsive and other apps like Safari and Activity Monitor don't close, just get minimized to the launch pad.

Hopefully I can backdate the OS, if that is the answer.

JimH:
That sounds like something wrong with the machine.  Are there any external drives involved?

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