iMac is running very slow.

Try some computer Maintenance ---

REPAIRING DISK PERMISSIONS -

NOTE: refer to article "About Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions feature" found herehttp://support.apple.com/kb/ht1452 - for the actual apple article on these step. ----

- click finder in the bottom dock, and in the window that opens, select applications in the left column - scroll through until you see the 'Utilities' folder and double click to open it. Then double click on 'Disk Utility'

- When prompted to select a disk volume or image, select the 'Macintosh HD' in the left column

- ensure the the "first aid" tab is highlighted blue in the middle of the screen

- click the button at the bottom that says 'Repair Disk Permissions'

- this process will take a few minutes to run. It will indicate it's done, by scrolling to the bottom of the "details area" displaying 'Permissions repair complete'

Dan Frankes has written an excellent article for Macworld on "Permissions" and the need to repair them - see - http://www.macworld.com/article/52220/2006/08/repairpermissions.html. Another good web site is - http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/durepairfns.html.

REPAIRING DISK -

NOTE: refer to article "Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck" found here - http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1417 - for the actual apple article on this step. --

Also see - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1452.

- with computer on, insert the computers "install disk 1" or "Mac OS X Install Disk" into the optical drive.

- shut down computer

- restart computer holding down the letter 'C' on the keyboard. Keep holding down the 'C' key, while the computer powers on, and continue to hold the key down, until you see a screen appear, asking for you to select a language. This may take a minute or so to appear. When this screen appears, release the 'C' key

- select english, then the continue arrow in the lower right corner

- the next screen will display "Welcome to the Installer". On this screen, we want to look into the top menu bar (beside the apple in the top left corner) and select 'Utilities' , then 'Disk Utility' ---

- When prompted to select a disk volume or image, select the 'Macintosh HD' in the left column

- ensure the the "first aid" tab is highlighted blue in the middle of the screen

- click the button at the bottom that says 'REPAIR DISK' .......NOT "Repair disk permissions"

- this process will take a few minutes to run. It will indicate it's done, by scrolling to the bottom of the "details area" displaying "The Macintosh HD appears OK"

If you get any other message OTHER than "The Macintosh HD appears OK", like "the Macintosh HD was repaired successfully" run the "Disk Repair" again, until it displays "The Macintosh HD appears OK".

Once done, beside the apple, click on the words "Mac OS X Installer", and select quit / restart. On the keyboard, hold down the eject key (top right corner, grey triangle pointing up, with a line underneath) until the disk ejects from the drive. Just let the computer start up normally.

NOTE - if you don't have or can't locate the install disks, you can follow the section 'Use fsck' of the same above article to boot into single user mode, and run the /sbin/fsck -fy command. This essentially runs the same test, that is on the install disk, just without the disk present---

Good advice so far, just to add...

Hello, see how many of these you can answer...

See if the Disk is issuing any S.M.A.R.T errors in Disk Utility...

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH7029

Open Activity Monitor in Applications>Utilities, select All Processes & sort on CPU%, any indications there?

How much RAM & free Disk space do you have also, click on the Memory & Disk Usage Tabs.

Open Console in Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.

In the Memory tab of Activity Monitor, are there a lot of Pageouts?

(BD, didn't see your post above while I was writing this. There is some repetition.)

Reparing Permissions is generally a total waste of time. It won't hurt, but it won't help anything. It is not needed for general maintenance. This is a tech zombie idea that refuses to die. And I doubt it has anything to do with the problem.

See this article for more. From 2005 and no less true today.

http://unsanity.org/archives/000410.php

@karen22357 Back to the immediate issue. A five year old computer slowing down might mean the hard drive is failing. Five years is around the average lifetime of a drive. What's important right now is to get a backup on it immediately, before it possibly dies completely and all data is lost, if the drive is failing.

Open up Disk Utility in Utilities, select the drive, the topmost listing and see if it says SMART Status verified or not.

But SMART from Disk Utility is not all that reliable. Get the free demo of Smart Utility to look more carefully at the health of the drive.

http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php

In addition, there may be inadequate RAM. Take a screenshot, Cmd-Shift-4, of the bottom of the System Memory tab in Activity Monitor (in Utilities) and post it here using the camera icon above. It will look like this.

Also, see the More Like This in the Sidebar at the right. This has been discussed many times.

Message was edited by: WZZZ