[michael180]

I have a Mac Pro with 8Gigs of memory. Lately it seems to be slowing way down. In Photoshop for instance, every action I do I get the spinning wheel. I dumped cache, ran Disk Utility to repair things, but nothing seems to work.

Any suggestions?

[seanc]

Do you have up to date backups? In Disk Utility, what is the S.M.A.R.T status of your hard drive?

[michael180]

What does that mean, S.M.A.R.T. status? And how to I find it?

Thanks

[seanc]

S.M.A.R.T means Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology.

Disk Utility is in Applications > Utilities.

Once you're in Disk Utility, Select your drive (not the partition). Look down at the bottom of the window, there will be S.M.A.R.T status: Verified (or Failing).

[michael180]

Okay I found it, and it says it's verified.

[reader50]

How full is your hard drive? Used vs free space.

It might be helpful to check Activity Monitor or 'top' in Terminal to see if anything is hogging CPU when photoshop beachballs on you.

[michael180]

I've used 358gigs, and have 107 available. How can I access my Activity Monitor? I know these are probably simple questions, but I can't understand why it's ground to almost a complete halt. I saved an image for the web, and it took almost 30 seconds to show up. I mean with 8 gigs of memory!

I typed top into Terminal, and got a bunch of stuff, what should I be looking for?

Thanks

[Cold Warrior]

Activity Monitor is inside the Utilities folder, which is inside Applications.

[michael180]

Got it.

Thanks

[ide3308]

You have to understand, photoshop can only use 3GB of real memory. So, unfortunately, having more than 4GB won't speed up PS. If your files are approaching this size, then you have to expect operations to take a long time.