[G5] slow dual core G5

[Daniel Rubinstein]

Good morning,
I am new to the list, and an experienced mac user of many years.

I have a dual core 2.3 running OS 10.4.3. The machine appears to work  
very slowly indeed. Spotlight takes several minutes to search for an  
item, mail is slower on this machine than on my partners G3 ibook.
An apple care person recommended deleting the cache folder and  
trashing the prefs. for spotlight, but this did not help to speed it up.
My question is: 1. are there any benchmark tests available to test  
the computer? I want to have some hard evidence to demonstrate speed  
issues 2. Is there a recommended optimizing tool? I did the 'repair  
permissions' stuff, but that did not seem to help.

Thank you list,

Daniel