New Mac Mini running slowly

Question

Just bought a new Mac Mini (1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo; 512MB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM). Innitially it seemed to run really quickly and smoothly. Then I started loading software on it like MS Office, downloaded Stuffit (new version). Now it takes forever to switch between applications, internet seems slower (but this may just be subjective). Once an app. is up and running it seems to be appropriately fast and responsive, but if I pause for too long, or change between open apps, it takes forever to repond.
Also, and this may be a separate issue, dragging and clicking, one of the beautifully intuitive things about Macs, doesn't seem to be consistantly intuitive anymore. Seems more and more like a PC! Maybe I'm just getting old and stupid, but I'm particularly having troubles with this in iTunes. I'll likely post about this over there too. Thanks for any suggestions.
John

Answer 1

Performance issues are often highly subjective, so as much as the system may seem to be deteriorating, it's possible that the sense it is doing so is based more on the resultant frustration from small changes in perceived speed resulting from such things as running non-native applications such as MS Office.
The previous poster is right, I think, in suggesting that you might try Neo Office instead of MS Office, since this will get you out from under the poor performance issues inevitably related to the use of Rosetta. In addition however, I think you might take this opportunity to do a little maintenance to ensure that the system is running as efficiently as possible.
The telling comment you make is that the system appeared to run well at first, but deteriorated in performance as you installed additional software. While it's possible you are reacting to a small subjective change, it's also possible that in installing additional software you have impacted MacOS. I would suggest you download a general-purpose utility such as YASU from www.versiontracker.com, and once installed, run all tasks (except deleting cookies). Particularly important in this situation is the prebinding task. Prebinding is the process which links applications and their libraries and updating it will make sure that this is correct. If it is not, you would typically find that applications are slow to open and can suffer brief 'stall-outs' as they are running.
YASU will also do some routine tasks such as repairing permissions, clearing log files and caches etc that can all be negatively impacted by installing software and updating the system, so the tasks involved can be beneficial in dealing with deteriorating performance.
The reboot after running YASU will take a little longer than usual - this is not a problem. Afterwards, once the system has rebuilt the cache files, you should notice slightly smoother performance, if not a little faster.