[X4U] Aggravatingly slow beach ball

[Mark Des Cotes]

Hi all,

I'm at wits end here. My 2.1 GHZ iMac G5 iSight running 10.4.11 with  
RAM maxed at 2.5GB has become so slow to respond that it's  
aggravating. The spinning beach ball is constantly appearing,  
sometimes for a split second and sometimes for 10 sec or longer.  
Simple tasks such as closing a Safari browser window will produce the  
beach ball for 5 seconds or longer before the window finally closes.  
Or creating a new mail message in Mail. When I click new message the  
beach ball appears and it takes a couple of second before the blank  
message window appears. This is all stuff that used to be  
instantaneous. Yesterday I was copying text from MSWord into Quark  
Xpress. I'd highlight a paragraph and copy. The beach ball appeared  
for what felt like forever but was no less than 10 seconds, before  
the copy completed and I could finally switch to Quark and paste.  
During the beach ball phase in any application, if I right click on  
the app's icon in the dock it says "Application not responding" but  
if I wait it out it works.

My hard drive is only 60% full, I've run DiskUtility, DiskWarrior,  
cleaned everything out with Onyx, I've even performed an archive and  
install of the OS but nothing has fixed the problem.

I'm a graphic designer and I use this computer every day for work.  
It's become very aggravating having to wait for the computer all the  
time. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,

Mark Des Cotes