M1 Mac mini taken to it's knees

I recently purchased an M1 Mac mini and was Initially blown away by how fast it was at first.

Like most systems, the performance is awesome until you start adding software.

Now it’s running incredibly slow.

I’ve done all the normal things about checking activity monitor, spotlight indexing, virus checkers and cannot find out why it’s running so slow.

I know that in Windows if you have multiple devices connected that sometimes that can consume system resources as it maintains the connection to all those devices. I was of the understanding that it is not quite such an issue on the Mac operating system.

I’ve spoken with Fujitsu while trying to get my scan snap I asked 500 working and they have indicated that there is hardware has problems with the USB connection.

I’m not sure where to go from here and if anyone has any suggestions I would appreciate it.

I will attempt to run EtraCheck Pro to gather some more data.

What other data can I collect that will help the troubleshooting process?

Are you running a real-time virus checker on your Mac? If so, which one?

What other persistent apps/services are you running?

KnockKnock by Objective-See is a good (free) tool to examine was has been set to run automatically on boot/login. What do you see there?

Start by disabling everything that runs 24/7 and then re-enable them slowly over the course of a few days and you might be able to figure out which is causing the problem.

Have a read of this ongoing thread too as it seems similar:

try uninstalling dropbox.

And make sure to backup your data first! :sweat_smile:

I have also installed everything that I was running my MBP, including Dropbox, and the M1 Mini is still screamingly fast.