Help me diagnose my slow Mac mini

Question

Hi All,
I bought my wife a Mac mini (2012) and all she does on it is email, web and chat (Google Hangouts, typically). She did all of this on her old 2007 iMac, but for some reason this new Mac mini is struggling hard. She will get the spinning beach ball of death very very frequently when just switching between tabs and between her browsers. She will typically have Safari and Firefox open at the same time doing different tasks in each one, but they're usually just displaying websites.
Its her computer, she uses it all day long but it will typically only exhibit the slow behaviour when I am at work. She's not very technical and wouldn't know what to look for to see if there is a runaway process or something of that sort. Ideally, what I would like is to have some kind of program running to capture CPU, memory and disk usage and let me see which process is doing what at certain times a day. Specifically, when her CPU gets pegged and things start to freeze up I want to see some kind of log or graph showing what each process was doing at the time, how much cpu they were using, and memory/disk usage. I know Activity Monitor shows this stuff real time, but is there a way to capture that to a log so I can examine it when I am there?
She is at her wits end and its frustrating for me because she can't replicate it when I am home.
Any help would be appreciated.
Trevor
PS: Mountain Lion, all updates. 4GB RAM, lots of disk space left.

Answer 1

First, back up all data immediately, as your boot drive might be failing.
There are a few other possible causes of generalized slow performance that you can rule out easily.
Reset the System Management Controller.
If you have many image or video files on the Desktop with preview icons, move them to another folder.
If applicable, uncheck all boxes in the iCloud preference pane.
Disconnect all non-essential wired peripherals and remove aftermarket expansion cards, if any.
Check your keychains in Keychain Access for excessively duplicated items.
Boot into Recovery mode, launch Disk Utility, and run Repair Disk.
If you're booting from an aftermarket SSD, see whether there's a firmware update for it.
Otherwise, take the steps below when you notice the problem.
Step 1
Launch the Activity Monitor application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Activity Monitor in the icon grid.
Select the CPU tab of the Activity Monitor window.
Select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected.
Click the heading of the % CPU column in the process table to sort the entries by CPU usage. You may have to click it twice to get the highest value at the top. What is it, and what is the process? Also post the values for % User, % System, and % Idle at the bottom of the window.
Select the System Memory tab. What values are shown in the bottom part of the window for Page outs and Swap used?
Next, select the Disk Activity tab. Post the approximate values shown for Reads in/sec and Writes out/sec (not Reads in and Writes out.)
Step 2
If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out this step.
Launch the Console application in the same way you launched Activity Monitor. Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Select the 50 or so most recent entries in the log. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V). You're looking for entries at the end of the log, not at the beginning.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some personal information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting. That should be easy to do if your extract is not too long.