Hard drive continuosly runs ,slowing down or stopping firefox

dell dimension locks up mostly when looking at emails

audleman wrote:
I am trying to troubleshoot an iMac that is exceedingly slow. The primary culprit is that the hard drive thrashes almost continuously. It doesn't matter if the computer has just been turned on and there are no applications running or if there are a dozen applications running, the hard drive will be doing something. The Activity Monitor shows see a lot of disk activity, both disk reads and disk writes.
I repaired permissions using Disk Utility, which didn't help.
I also ran a full disk scan using Tech Tools Pro but it found nothing.
I downloaded a demo iDefrag and had it analyze my disk. It looked like the disk was heavily fragmented. I am considering purchasing it and running a defrag, but everything I read says that there is no need to defrag a Macintosh hard drive so I'm holding back.
Any advice on what next steps I should take to troubleshoot my Mac?
Thank you,
Kevin Audleman
Run the ActivityMonitor and see what is happening.
As noted here, you may be running out of available RAM, the usual cause of "thrashing" or there may be some other app running wild.

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