ICal is VERY slow

Question

My iCal suddenly (past week) takes approx. 3 minutes to open and equally as long when I select an event.
I am worried now however becuase my USB and firewire ports have also quit.
I also tried to load the latest Virex DAT files (worried there may be a virus cause for all this) and was told I didn't have enough hard drive space for the download (I have 140 G available???).
I don't know where to start but am starting to think this is all related. I only know it started with the recognition of the iCal trouble.
Please help.
Baron

Answer 1

iCal has always been a slow, pokey application on my 800mhz iMac. Newer versions installed as I upgraded OS through the years to 10.4.8 haven't made it any faster. Right now it is almost unusable, going into spinning beachball waits after I type half a line of text. Does this application have some memory leak problem, or does it get chronically crippled after some thousands of entries are stored in its database? Other simple calendar programs I've used in the past for peecees and sgi machines never slowed the computer down to a crawl by just typing 5 words of text. Is there anybody out there running ical on an old 800mhz imac, with many years of calendar entries, that can use iCal without all the spinning beachballs and extreme wait times? Is there anything that can be done (disk defragmentation etc.) that can speed up the performance of iCal on a machine that doesn't have any hardware or font or permissions problems? And if this abysmal performance is universal for all users with iMacs that are a few years old, is there any other more efficient calendar program for macs that can import several years of ical data? Doesn't do much good to have a pretty application if it runs so sluggishly that you have to go microwave your coffee to kill time until it catches up enough to type another line of text.