IMac started to hang!!

I have had my mac for little over a year now and have just started to experience my first taste of mac issues. For some reason my OS (leopard 10.5.8) takes forever to do anything. All I have for company most of the time is the colour wheel. It also fails to pick up my time capsule after a reboot. When it does hang everything hangs, even my network bandwidth crawls to a stop (0kbps). Then it will start up again (700kbps) then die off in a matter of minutes if not seconds.
I thought it might be network related so I turned off airport and disconnected my Ethernet but I still experience the same issues. Also done a permissions repair.
Loading up Firefox takes minutes, watching a movie causes the film to be interrupted (skip). I'm really at a loss as to what might be causing this. Any help greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Hi collinsadrian
I'd like to play a little game that will help test your HD, if your up to it do the following.
Go to: System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items and jot down the items in the list and then remove them from the list so that nothing opens at login.
Now restart your iMac and then once it's booted up first thing open Activity Monitor and select the Disk Activity tab and look at the Graph. Now move the Graph to the lower right hand corner of your Display where you can see it while opening other Applications.
Now here comes the test:
1. What is the level of Disk Activity with nothing open?
2. Open iTunes and tell me what the Peak: __ MB/sec was?
3. Open iPhoto and tell me what the Peak: __ MB/sec was?
4. Open GarageBand and tell me what the Peak: __ MB/sec was?
Also note how sharp the peaks are, sharp high peaks will generally indicate a healthy HD and OS while low flat rolling hills indicates a problem.
Dennis

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