EtreCheck Report - Anything I Can Do?

Performance:...

Write speed: 28 MB/s

Read speed: 26 MB/s

These numbers should be near 200-250 MB/s on that Mac with the 5400 RPM rotational hard drive.

To bring the performance back up to where it should be, you have a couple of options.

One is to take the Mac to a service center and have the internal drive replace with a new faster drive such as an SSD. This is the more complex and expensive option.

A second option is to buy and use an external SSD as the startup drive. The performance boost will be dramatic even compared to a healthy hdd. This is the less expensive option and one you can do yourself without doing surgery to your iMac.

For guidance on how to setup and use an external startup drive for your Mac, please see this user tip by Jack-19:

Use an external SSD as your startup disk … - Apple Community

The scores are indeed still far below nominals for the drive model, which are 70-80MB/sec.

Something is amiss here. If you just ordered the LaCie SSD, it should be USB-3 5GB. it is showing as USB-2 in the report:

disk1 - LaCie Mobile SSD 1.00 TB

External USB 480 Mbit/s USB ⚠️

That can happen if you use a USB2 cable on a USB3 device. USB-3 cables have blue plastic in the connectors:

If you no no longer use a BlackBerry, remove the old RIM/Blackberry software.

That’s the ever-popular iMac 8 GB HDD model, and the HDD is even slower than usual.

Whether the HDD is failing, or just overloaded?

Here is why that iMac is slow: Why is my hard disk drive iMac so slow? - Apple Community

Here is what to do to somewhat de-slow it: Use an external SSD as your startup disk … - Apple Community

I would upgrade to an external SSD and not HDD. The HDD is (even if it’s working) part of your performance problem.

That iMac is seriously underpowered for running Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office, and I’d probably remove Java and the Coupon app if you don’t need those. Java because it’s fairly performance-intensive, and the coupon app as advertising-related and adware-related and metadata-collection-related apps can introduce issues.

Basically, offload what you can, in order to fit into the performance capabilities of that iMac.

As part of that app off-loading, if the HP printer you have both supports AirPrint and lacks subscription ink, I’d switch to AirPrint and remove the HP apps.

I’m not sure what the following is, but it looks seriously sketchy:

[Other] com.sys.system.plist (Not signed - installed 2019-08-07)
Executable: ~/Library/Application Support/.system/assistant

Your hard drive is failing. Back it up now. Do nothing else with the computer until you can do that.

You might want to get the DriveDX app, which does a complete analysis and report about your drives.

https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx

  [Loaded] com.coupons.coupond.plist (Not signed - installed 2022-07-29)

Get rid of that also. It's a scam.

That's great to hear!

I'm not the person to advise you on what you should do about the failing hard drive but, lots of other people here will be able to make suggestions. Hopefully someone will stop by.

Don't beat yourself up! I could fill a book the the gaffs I've made over nearly 40 years of playing with personal computers. I'm just glad you now have some really decent speeds. Well played!