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bob32256Flag for United States of America

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iMac G5 runs very slowly

I have an iMac G5:
CPU - PowerPc G5 1.8GHz
Memory = 2 GB
OS X 10.4.11
It runs very slowly. When mousing over dock icons, it can take several seconds for the dock to respond. Switching between programs takes an incredibly long time. I have already tried the following:
- optimized the disk
- repaired permissions
- removed everything from the desktop
- run all tests in Tech Tool Pro 4 - everything passed
Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks!
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pheidius

How much free space do you have left on your drive? Assuming that you have at least 10 percent free, then you might try creating a temp user with full admin privileges. Reboot and log into this new user and see if the behavior persists. If it runs normally then you have isolated the problem to something with your user profile/library. If the problem persists then the problem is more systemic. Also have you looked at activity monitor and checked to see if any particular program is using too much of your system resources/cpu. When it is running slowly what percentage of the cpu is being used. Anyway, this should give you a start. Report back with progress and/or other info.
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ASKER

Sorry for the delay...
I have roughly 50% of my drive space free.
I created a temp user and the result was the same.
The activity monitor shows that the CPU has spurts to 100% but generally runs 20-40% idle. When the computer is responding very slowly and I get an extended spinning wheel, the activity monitor freezes.
I also checked system memory. Out of the 2GB, "free" dips to as little as 20MB. What's the difference between "free" and "inactive"? Could this have anything to do with the problem?
Thanks for your help.
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pheidius

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I ran everything under mainmenu, but the problem remained. Then I noticed a process - agentdaemon - was using huge amounts of memory and CPU. I found that the process was from Network Magic. I uninstalled the program and my computer is back to normal. Thanks! If you had not suggest looking at the activity monitor, I'd still be looking for a solution.