How do you stop Mountain Lion slowing everything down

I recently upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion - which I so regret doing now.
I have a 24 inch iMac core duo 2.6ghz with 8 GB RAM (mid 2009) and a mid 2010 Mac Mini core duo 2.4ghz with 4GB RAM - so both with maximum RAM installable. Both Hard drives are under half full.
I use the Office 2011 for Mac software as well as the normal iLife suite. I occasionally use parallels to run some Windows software, but I always swith parallels off when not using it. And I occasionally have logmein running when I am going to be away for a few days, but switch it off when I am back. That's it - nothing too weird.
Since upgrading both to Mountain Lion I now experience a hige slowness in using anything. Web pages take ages to load. A Word dociment can take 30 second to open. It takes over 90 seconds to start up iMovie etc.
I saw posts on this formum suggesting that I
a) Repair disk permissions
b) delete the caches in ~/Library and in /Library
c) reboot
I have done all these things. Immediately afterwards my system speeded up to a more acceptable level. But 2 days later and it is back to an unacceptable slow speed
Surely I dont have to keep doing the three things above every day?
is there a way of going back to Snow Leopard? That will be much cheaper than having to buy a new iMac (which are way too expensive and the 21inch screen would be a downsize from what I have now and the bigger screen is even further beyond my budget
Or can anyone help me get Mountain Lion working quickly - all the time?
Many thanks

I have the same early 2009 24" iMac as you do and I just completed reverting back to Snow Leopard from Mountain Lion.
The process was time consuming and took about 3 days to do. I also reverted an early 2011 MacBook Pro which also took 3 days.
Basically the first thing is to completely backup your machine as it now is under Mountain Lion. You may also want to drag and drop all of your user folders and shared folders onto the backup HD. Make a copy of all of your passwords, software licenses and the Mountain Lion keychain onto the backup HD.
iLife '11 and iWork '09 run under Snow Leopard and so those are not an issue. They can just be reinstalled after Snow Leopard is running.
The four parts of the reversion that entail some work are; 1: converting your Mountain Lion Mail boxes to Snow Leopard, 2: converting your Mountain Lion iPhoto Library back to Snow Leopard, 3: converting your Contacts (Address Book) to Snow Leopard and 4: converting Calendar (iCal) to Snow Leopard.
Converting Mountain Lion Mail to Snow Leopard
          1. From your user Library, copy the Mail folder to your backup HD
          2. Double-click the Mail folder and the V2 folder will open
          3. Double-click the V2 folder and your will have a list of your email addresses and a folder called Mailboxes
          4. These folders contain your mail box files (mbox) from which you can recover all of you email and import it back into Snow Leopard. In each email account, you will need to open a number of folder to get to the actual mbox file. The Mailboxes folder contains your On My Mac mailboxes (you may or may not have any of these).
Converting Mountain Lion iPhoto Library to Snow Leopard:
          1: Control-click (Right Click) the Mountain Lion iPhoto Library file
          2: Look for a folder named Masters
          3. The Masters folder contains all of your original, unmodified photos
          4. Copy the Masters folder to your backup HD as you will use it to import your photos into the Snow Leopard iPhoto Library
Converting Mountain Lion Contacts to Snow Leopard
          1. From Mountain Lion, export all of your contacts as vCards and save these on your backup HD
          2. These vCards will be imported into the Snow Leopard Address Book
Converting Mountain Lion Calendar to Snow Leopard
          1. From Mountain Lion, export all of your calendars as iCal files and save these on your backup HD
          2. These iCal files will be imported into the Snow Leopard iCal (Calendar)
Be sure to do all of this preparatory work first and that the backup files are usable.
Using the Snow Leopard installation DVD, restart your machine while pressing the C key to start from the DVD. Use Snow Leopard's Disk Utility to erase the hard drive completely overwriting it with zeros. (Be sure to select the hard drive itself and not just the Macintosh HD partition as you want to completely erase the HD). This will take about an hour and a half.
Next, Install Snow Leopard and then apply ALL software updates. You will need to repeat Software Update until Software Update displays the software is all up to date message. Next install iLife, iWork and all other Apple software and again, apply ALL software updates. The point is to get the standard Apple software running and configured before installing any other applications.
The iTunes library is the same for Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion so just restore your iTunes library from the backup and it will work.
At this point you can restore your Mail, iTunes, iPhoto Library, Contacts and iCal. When all of the Apple components are running correctly, install all other software and restore your user data.
I've been a programmer and in the IT industry for over 30 years and if there is one piece of advice I can give you it is this: take your time doing all of this and be sure that each component is working correctly before moving on to the next. It's tedious and time consuming but it can be done.
For me, the deal breaker with Mountain Lion is the way that saving files is implemented. This is a type of version control and version control has always been problematic just as syncing is. You never know what syncing really means and what is changed until it's too late.
Also, there was a lot of useful functionality removed in Mountain Lion and a number of things added that have no place in an operating system.

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How do you stop Mountain Lion from making endless copies and backups of everything?!

I already have a similar topic on this when I needed to figure out how to stop Mountain Lion from making endless copies of my text edit files and I was going to try the disabling of it that someone in that thread suggested, but I can't find where the Versions backups are being stored.
Anyway, tonight I cam across a new problem, when I went into "about this Mac" and looked at my Storage, I had almost 1gb of data in the "backups" section. I just happened to have Finder open when I went into the Time Machine in the status bar and when it entered Time Machine, I had dozens of copies of my desktop. Thing is, I don't have my Time Machine hard drive connected and I don't have a Time Capsule router/hard drive. And don't give me this garbage about how "It's not real backups, it's just a snapshot" or whatever, because the ONLY things that I have stored on my computer that I have altered since I got mountain lion is two Text Edit files and the Finder Desktop (and yes, I have checked almost all the programs I use, and of the things that Time Machine will open in, those are the only things that have backups listed that I can access) and almost 1gb is being taken up completely needlessly with the computer backing up things onto itself. Obviously these are more than just snapshots and are obviously the real files because after throwing EVERYTHING on my desktop into a file, that file is only 3.8mb in size, so that almost 1GB in backups is coming from SOMEWHERE.
The solution I aluded to in my first sentence also depends on going into the Terminal to make each individual app stop auto saving Versions, however, since my desktop is being backed up, there's no program to stop Mountain Lion from doing that.
Can anyone help me figure out how to make it stop backing up? Seriously, almost 1 gb is being totally wasted on a series of desktop items that are 3.8mb in size, one Text Edit file that is 250kb in size, and another text edit file that is 41kb in size. What person in Apple would possibly have thought this endless backing up of files onto the main hard drive would have been a good idea? So in a year if I did nothing but go on the internet, save one picture to one file on my desktop and did nothing else with my computer, would I have 200 gb of desktop backups that the computer saved onto itself? Are you kidding me? OR failing that, can anyone tell me how to find this damned backup file and delete it? I'm not an idiot, I know how to plug in a hard drive or flash drive and backup my information, I don't need my computer to be making hundreds of copies of every single file on my computer that I change slightly onto itself that not only needlessly eats up it's own space, but if the hard drive died, all those "backups" would be gone too because it wrote the backups to itself.
I am so frustrated by this totally ridiculous and wasteful "feature" they put in, it does nothing but waste hard drive space with it's hundreds of copies of everything you alter slightly. And I am absolutely not starting any video editing projects until I figure out how to turn this off. If around 4mb of total text and desktop backups add up to almost 1gb in a few weeks, what the heck is a video editing project going to end up in with size? Am I the only one completely flustered by this ridiculousness? Is there any point in writing into Apple to complain or are they just going to say "No, we're brilliant, we think this is an amazing feature so you just have to deal iwth it and when your hardd drive fills up, too bad, jerk!"?? Help! Thanks!

Well as I pointed out in my post, "Sadly, my Text Edit documents are still all there, every single time I opened them and made a small change, there is another copy stretching all the way back to the day I installed Mountain Lion." so if you can explain to me how July 26 - Aug 16 is a week, I will concede that it is a good idea. Short of that, no I have been capable of making my own backups since I was 16 years old (16 years ago) I don't need my computer to endlessly do it for me in a way I am completely unable to shut off. That's what I have external hard drives, flash drives, a DVD burner, Drop Box, E-mail (as in emailing copies to myself) and icloud for. If I am doing something and I don't have access to a single one of those options, I don't know why I brought my computer with me in the first place. And I don't see how you can say it's an illusory gain in disk space, hundreds of copies of text documents, garageband files, Final Cut files, Motion Files and basically any program that makes files onto my comptuer that I can myself make incremental changes to, those all need to be stored somehow. Again, if you can explain to me how July 26 - Aug 16 is a week, I will agree with you that that is a good thing because IF it only saved for a week, it wouldn't be an issue. Sadly, no matter how many links you post, I still have text edit backups stretching from today back to July 26. They're not going away and I have no reason to beleive any other file I edit is going to go away either since they haven't been. They're all there eating up HD space and this imaginary "week" limit is simply not coming into effect. I hate it and there needs to be a simple way to simply shut it off. I didn't spend hundreds of dollars on external drives just for my main hard drive to be filled up with hundreds un useless, undeletable backups of stuff I already have backed up.

How do you install mountain lion on additional macs?

How do you install Mountain Lion on additional Macs?

Log in to App store on other computer with the apple ID that Mountain Lion was purchased with.
Click on Purchases icon at top of page.
Download and install.
R

How do you install mountain lion on all your macs in the household using one 20 dollar license?

how do you install mountain lion on all your macs in the houshold with the same license (you only pay 20 bucks for all your macs) is that right?

As long as they're all logged into the Mac App store with the same Apple ID, you can re-download the installer to all the Macs.
Or you can save a copy of the installer file before you run it and use that to update the other Macs. The ML installer file will appear in your Applications folder when it's done downloading. Copy it to another location (don't move it).
If you don't copy it before you upgrade, it will disappear when ML is finished installing.

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I have an SSD (used as the system disk) in my iMac, and after noticing that its lifespan (according to S.M.A.R.T.) has ticked down a bit, I started looking at what's writing to the system disk, using iostat, iotop, and fs_usage.
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YOu can get it stop by going to ~/Library/Saved Application State/TextEdit (by example) and delete that file…
(note that the User Library is hidden - one way to get there is to go to your Finder "Go" menu hold the option key to choose "Library")
You can also delete all Saved Application State files
Or use Terminal to turn off Resume globally...
chflags uchg ~/Library/"Saved Application State"
Press return
Or
defaults write -g ApplePersistence -bool no

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The Apple Support Communities are an international user to user technical support forum. As a man from Mexico, Spanish is my native tongue. I do not speak English very well, however, I do write in English with the aid of the Mac OS X spelling and grammar checks. I also live in a culture perhaps very very different from your own. When offering advice in the ASC, my comments are not meant to be anything more than helpful and certainly not to be taken as insults.
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Sorry, I'm confused.
The recovery partition from Tech Tool, this is on the internal HD or on a CD/DVD?
Is this the same thing as the TechTool disk that your computer can boot into?
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If you install Mountain Lion on your external drive and use it as the boot drive for your computer, it will be very slow, and you won't be happy. I'd forget that idea.
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a safe boot Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? and then disk utility
boot into single user mode and see if you can repair your hard drive Repair Your Hard Disk in Single User Mode | Everything Macintosh
internet recovery OS X: About OS X Recovery
recovery disk assisant, if you have made one already OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0
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How do you stop Mountain Lion slowing everything down

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