Is there a way to help my desktop computer?

Hi everyone,

My issue is concerning my desktop computer at work. I'm not very technical, so please bare with me.

It's an Apple, Mac desktop computer from anywhere between 2009 to 2011 (I'm not sure how to tell). It's running the Mac OS X version 10.6.8 with a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 of memory.

I thought maybe it was getting slow because it was running out of space, so I purchased a large external hard drive to backup all of my files on. Now I only have current things I need on the computer while everything else remains on the external hard drive. It has up 500 GB of storage with currently 223 GB available.

I've been noticing that the computer has been having trouble over the last few weeks running some programs. I don't use very many programs on here, I tend to stick with the following:

- Adobe CS6 Master Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, and Dream Weaver)

- Adobe Acrobat Professional

- iMovie

- FileZilla

- Microsoft Word

- FireFox

- Safari

I do have many more programs on the computer, but I barely use them (if ever).

It rarely crashes, but I get the "colour/pin wheel of death" a lot, things take forever to open, and/or they just freeze for minutes at a time.

Is there anything I can do to help my poor computer? I love this thing. I would be the best thing in the world if I could help it live a healthy life (lol) 😍. I'm hoping there is something I can do for it.

You guys have really helped me out the last couple of times I had issues. I decided to come here instead of Google because who would know better than the Apple community!

P.S. thanks to you guys my MacBook Pro could not be better! Thank you for always helping with my silly problems *high five*