IMac running abnormaly slow with Leopard - Intel, 2GHz, 2GB

Question

Hey All,
I've been having an issue with my iMac recently.. I've had it for almost a year now, its been running great till about 3-4 months ago. I mainly do Graphic Design and Photography so the hardrive was pretty full(about 20GB left) I figured this was, what, was causing my mac to slow down so much.. so I went out and bought an external hardrive 250GB I transfered all my files and several softwares. Even then my mac was still running slow. So I decide to clean out and start over using the Tiger OS CD, it took close to 7 hours to erase everything from the comp and install tiger back into my system.. When that was done I booted my computer and it would stay in the spinning gear screen for hours. After about 3 hours of **** and almost tears(LOL) it came back.. But STILL running slow. Even with nothing but basics in the computer!
A month later a friend bought leopard family pack. I thought maybe it would help. So we did a complete install of leopard. once again; deleting all old files; Which weren't much by that time. It took a good 19-20 hours to install leopard on the comp. Once it was done I booted and the same screen came up only it didn't take as long. The computer is acting a bit better, but still WAY too slow. It takes a while to boot up, and freezes almost constantly. I turn it on in the morning so its usable in the afternoon, I can only have basic softwares open ( Safari, iChat, Mail) if I start Photoshop etc it will work VERY slow! and crash to where theres no option but using the button in the back. I then thought, "maybe I need more RAM (since I had the stock 1GB) Maybe I fried the stock one." So just yesterday I bought 2 X 1GB for it. at first it wouldn't start, just the light would turn on, I toggled the Chips a bit and it turned on.. I CAN see an improvment.. Its still WAY to slow on boot up (it will stay on a solid blue screen for about 2-3 minutes) but doesn't take long to load my dock once its already on. It is working better, but still constantly loading with the now annoying little ball(I used to love that thing LOL)
I have nothing else to do - I am taking it to the Apple store this weekend.. Its a long drive! I was hoping I wouldn't have to.
Any ideas before taking it down there? Do you guys think they will be able to fix the problem?
Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this!
- Jose

Answer 1

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
If after an erase and install frequent spinning beachballs occur without addition of third party software or hardware, usually that means the RAM has gone bad, or an internal hardware issue has developed. Do you have the original installer discs for the computer to run the hardware test from?