G4 Dragging Problem

[Howard Rush Productions]

I hope someone out there can help me with this, cause its driving me
nuts.

The problem I am having is that through out the day my mac starts to
drag or delay and especially if I am on line. It seems to be fine in the
morning when I start my day and by the end of the drags badly. What I
mean by drag is for example, I type and sentence and the letters show up
2 or 3 minutes later.

I have a silver G4 and I am using classic OS (9.2.2). It has an 80 gig
hard drive and 1.5 gigs of RAM. I am freelance Graphic Designer and some
of the programs I use are not compatible at this time with OSX. I also
have earthlink dsl with a speed stream dsl modem. I have run norton
utilities on it and still have the problem. I have had this particular
mac for almost a year and it has not always acted this way. Someone
mention to me maybe spyware or something like that. I had never heard of
that before and wonder if that is even possible?

Does any one out have this same problem and/or no how to correct it.

Thanks in advance!!
Barry Rush