Extremely Slow Response Time Amongst other things

Question

I've had my Powerbook G4 for almost 4 years now, and I have just recently starting having problems with it. It takes forever to connect to the internet and most of the time it takes about a minute for the mouse to catch up to what my finger is doing, and then to actually open a program such as Word or iTunes, which are commonly used programs for me, it will take 2-5 minutes. As well as it will stop typing randomly, for instance it just did it now typing this paragraph, and then it'll catch up about a minute later. Is this normal or is there anything I can do to fix this? I've tried rebooting it, and doing software updates but nothing has fixed it or made it better yet. Please help!

Answer 1

Welcome to the Apple discussions.
If you haven't already, you might want to read this performance FAQ: http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/performance.html . This will discuss, for example, the need to keep a minimum of your hard drive free for systems usage, sometimes expressed as 10% to 15% of the hard drive capacity.
Some have found using a utility like OnyX, available at http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs2/english/download.html can help restore performance to a sluggish system. Do the tasks on the maintenance and cleaning tab, which may require reboot(s). Of course, before using any disk maintenance program it's good practice to have a current backup of the internal hard drive.
Have you checked recently that you have the memory you expect to have, i.e. you should have 2GB and you confirm the system agrees? Click the blue apple and about this mac to see the amount of memory the system recognizes.