Quick-fire questions
How to run Diagnostics on my M1 MacBook Pro?
> M1 Macs don’t respond to traditional key combinations held during startup. You need to start your Mac up and enter Startup Options by pressing and holding the Power button until those begin loading. Once the first Startup Options screen appears, press and hold ⌘+D until your Mac restarts and the Diagnostics Loader menu appears.
How to mute my Mac’s startup chime?
> In recent macOS, this is controlled in the Sound Effects tab of the Sound pane. On older system, it’s stored in the NVRAM settings. For those, open Terminal and type the command
At the following prompt, enter your admin user’s password.
iMac grinding to a halt
My iMac 2012 has a 3TB Fusion Drive, and has recently slowed to a crawl, taking seconds to respond to a mouse click. What’s wrong with it?
QBefore looking for software solutions, ensure you’ve got ample free storage space and run hardware diagnostics to check your Fusion Drive in particular. Thirdparty utilities such as DriveDx from bit.ly/ mac375drivedx or TechTool Pro also look at ‘wear’ in the SSD component of a Fusion Drive. Memory used in that has a fixed number of times it can be erased and rewritten before it stops working. Fusion Drives with small SSDs, less than 100 GB, which are used intensively can wear out in less than their anticipated 10-year life, then requiring replacement.
AIf both components in your Fusion Drive appear healthy and not worn out, and there’s plenty of free space, you can turn your attention to software which could be doing this. Traditionally, the next step would be to clean re-install macOS, which could bring resolution when you’re still running Catalina, although it’s less likely to be of any benefit on a more recent Mac running Big Sur or Monterey, because of their sealed systems. Running EtreCheck from etrecheck.com can help pinpoint software problems.
As your Mac is no longer capable of running a recent version of macOS, and repairs are becoming increasingly difficult, consider whether this wouldn’t be a good time to upgrade to an M1 model. Apart from its generally faster hardware, an internal SSD would bring huge improvements in speed.
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