[kramer3380]

Hey guys,
my mac is old i bought it in december of 2006, about a year and a half ago i needed to replace the hard drive but other than that i haven't had any problems what so ever. But recently my mac is much slower than normal and im starting to see that "beach ball" like icon spin more and more. At first I thought that it was just my internet being slow because it would take a while for some pages to load. This morning I went to wake my computer out of sleep and the same beach ball mouse cursor was spinning for a good 5 minutes. The screen was still black as if it were still in sleep mode. Does any body have any ideas on what this could be. Im thinking that i might have some type of hardware that might be going. I have to gigs of ram and 92 gigs of hard drive space left, im not sure on what other info you guys might need to help me out so just let me know what you need and ill get it to you soon.

Thanks guys!!

[planetaterra]

my Imac is just the same its the processer thing that is worn out and i was informed it can't be replaced. my Imac was supposed to has a 5 years life and its more then 6.....

The thing is i cant have a glossy display : its ugly , bad for the eyes AND I work with images....
Also the 20 inches has a very bad screen so i'm waiting for a matte screen!

remember when they are slow the way you say they need to be replaced..

[mduell]

It may be a lot of things, but it's certainly not "worn out."

[P]

There are a million things this could be. I'd start with checking the directory with Disk Utility. You can check it while booted regularly (the application is in /Applications/Utility) but you need to boot from the install disc to repair anything.

Other than that, you can try installing the latest combo update to whatever OS you're using. That tends to fix a few off issues.

[P]

Originally Posted by planetaterra 

my Imac is just the same its the processer thing that is worn out and i was informed it can't be replaced. my Imac was supposed to has a 5 years life and its more then 6.....

I'm really curious who told you that, and what they meant. Processors do not wear out in the common sense. Electromigration might hurt them over time, especially if overvolted, but the warranty times for that are either 8 or 25 years depending on the exact specs.

Originally Posted by planetaterra 

The thing is i cant have a glossy display : its ugly , bad for the eyes AND I work with images....
Also the 20 inches has a very bad screen so i'm waiting for a matte screen!

Then you are in luck, at least a little, because the new 21.5" iMac has a significantly better display (IPS quality, like the old 24", with LED backlights). It's still glossy, though, but if you require a matte screen, you are in for a very long wait. For a desktop like the iMac, you can arrange your workspace to eliminate the the reflection problems. It's a bigger problem for laptops, where you may not be able to control the environment around you.

[Sosa]

Check the activity monitor, look at the processes that are running, are any utilizing too much CPU or memory? Sometimes there are applications that have memory leaks and eat up your RAM, causing general slowdowns. Other times applications max out your CPU and you have to force quit them. This happens occasionally to me with Safari and certain cites.

Make sure you have your firewall active in Preferences.

If it is not a process taking out your CPU or RAM, I'm not sure. Rebooting the computer does not solve it? Do you have the latest Apple updates? One time intensive option is to back up your computer to an external hard disk using one of several programs out there and make it into a bootable copy (can't think of the name for the one I use but it is very good), restart your computer from that bootable copy (you have to press a certain combination of keys during booting to select the disk to boot from, I would have to look it up), and then:

1. Inspect your iMac disk using Disk utility, check permissions, repair, etc. or
2. Delete the hard-drive and use the backup program to copy everything over again. or
3. Delete the hard-drive and do a clean install of your OS

People used to advocate doing a clean install of your operating system periodically as that seemed to improve performance. Apparently stuff accumulates on your computer, maybe files become fragmented and the computer has to work harder to obtain the data. I'm certainly no expert at this but I have experienced improvements from doing a clean install. My 1 ghz G4 is slowing down again after last year's bootable backup, delete HD, and recopy effort. I want to do it again but now my backups are failing due to some corrupted files and I already deleted the old bootable backups!

[Veltliner]

Run Disc Warrior 4.0.

You should do this once in a while anyway.