iMac 2019 running extremely slow after a power outage
My husband's 2019 iMac has been running extremely slowly ever since we had a power outage. He upgraded to macOS Sequoia several weeks before the outage and everything was working fine until the power went out.
Specs:
- 2019 iMac
- 3.7 GHz Intel Core i5
- 32 GB RAM
- macOS Sequoia 15.7.7
The problem seems to affect the entire system, not just one application. Apple's apps (Safari, Music, Books, System Settings, Messages, etc.) are all very slow.
When restarting the Mac (including trying different startup modes), it was taking a very long time to boot. After entering the password, the screen would stay gray for quite a while before the desktop finally appeared. I disabled all of the startup items and unplugged the Mac for a while. After doing that, it started booting normally again without the long gray screen, so I may have solved that part of the problem.
One thing that might be relevant is that my husband keeps a very large number of folders on his desktop. I'm not sure if that's contributing to the slowdown.
When I open Activity Monitor, several Apple apps and processes show "Not Responding," including System Settings, Messages, Keynote, Music, Books, and others.
At first I thought Safari was the only issue because it would freeze constantly. I tried:
- Clearing the Safari cache and browsing history.
- Deleting Safari-related files from the Library folder.
Neither of those helped. Now Chrome is also very slow, so it appears to be a system-wide problem rather than a browser issue.
The Mac has 32 GB of RAM, so I don't think memory is the bottleneck. iCleanMemory reports more than 20 GB (20,000+ MB) of available memory.
I also ran First Aid in Disk Utility, and it didn't report any problems with the startup disk.
Has anyone experienced something like this after a power outage? Could the outage have corrupted something that Disk Utility isn't detecting? Could this be related to iCloud, since many of the apps that show "Not Responding" are Apple apps?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.