[G4] Sudden Slowdown

[jim carbone]

Hi All,

I'm having an issue with my G4 that I hope I can get a little insight  
on so I can start trying to locate the problem.

Recently, my machine has been running very slow. Small tasks in  
Photoshop now bring out the progress bar and make me wait... I'm also  
seeing more of the ol' beach ball than I have in quite some time.  
I've started keeping the Activity Monitor RAM pie chart running in  
the dock to keep an eye on it, and it appears that RAM gets used and  
never released. I never see large chunks of free RAM anymore--it's  
there on a restart, then it goes away as I work, and doesn't come  
back, even as I quit applications. At this moment, I have the  
following RAM picture:

Wired: 159.31MB
Active: 1.21GB
Inactive: 628.11MB
Free: 23.18MB
Used: 1.98GB

This is with all apps closed (except Mail). This was never the norm,  
I am used to keeping way more applications open at a time than I  
probably should, and this machine has always been a trooper for it.

I hope this describes my symptoms enough to field some suggestions.  
My troubleshooting so far has been the following items (not  
necessarily in this order):

-- Restart
-- Power down/Restart
-- Repair disk & permissions w/ Disk Utility
-- Ran a standard and a deep Applejack process

As for things I may have done or changed just prior to this slowdown,  
the only thing I can think of is I used CCCloner to clone my HD for  
archival purposes and it had an issue with some photo in my iPhoto  
library. That's the only weirdness I've experienced recently, all  
else has been business as usual.

My machine specs are as follows:

G4 MDD Dual 1.25mhz
2 GB RAM
System HD: 60GB, 32GB used/ 3 other HDs in the case
OSX 10.4.7 (10.4.6 installed from Retail DVD, upgrade to 10.4.7 via  
Software Update)

Any ideas on what I should look for? I look at the processes and  
don't really know what half of them are--if they should be running or  
not, or if they're using more resources than they should be.

Any help or suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks!
--jim