MacMini-hopelessly sluggish

Question

For the past couple of weeks my MAC has become hopelessly sluggish-not all the time ;but most of the time.Typical performance-when it's aroused from sleep, it takes about 30 sec. to see a screen,another 30 sec. before anything on the screen can be "clicked",then another 30 sec before anything happens(spinning beach balls appear frequently) It's often very slow to launch an App from the Dock (over a min. to launch Appleworks along with many spinning balls).
Another strange indication-during a sluggish period I occasionally get a window indicating that a script cannot complete and should it be stopped. A typical citation was:
script:chrome://google-toolbar/content/gtb.js:119 I can't seem to locate the scripts they cite or I would happily delete them.
The disk does not seem crowded (Leopard is in a 42 Gb partition with 11Gb free) The activity monitor does not indicate unusual CPU usage (altho this is not measured during the sluggish periods).
I have tried restarting from the install disk and using disk utility to check the disk. This does resolve the problem; but it soon recurs.
I have also restarted in Tiger in another partition on the same disk.Everything works fine- no sluggishness, but I'd rather keep using Leopard.
I wanted to try OnyX that Greg suggested to Nick but got an Error msg trying to contact the URL.
Is there some kind of Malware attacking the MAC now ??

Answer 1

It seems like there could be a couple of different explanations if there is no connection to running a browser.
1) When you start slowing down, try to run Utilities > Activity Monitor and click on the System Memory tab. What does it say at the bottom for PageOuts and PageIns? A ratio of Outs-to-Ins (the reverse of how they list it) that is noticeably greater than 10% would likely indicate a program with a memory leak that is causing Virtual Memory to be over-used. Dashboard widgets are candidates for such leaky programs.
2) Your hard drive might have flaky sectors in the portion that is storing your Leopard installation. Run DiskUtility (DU) and click on the manufacturer's name in the left panel of DU for your startup hard drive (not the volume name). What does it say for SMART status at the bottom of the right panel in DU?
3) You may just have a bad installation of Leopard. Sometimes re-installing the last (very large!) full "combo update" of Leopard, will solve weird issues. After doing the update, you should still run Software Update, to pick up any other changes.
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL866
4) Another useful test is to create a new account, and see if it suffers the same issues.
5) And yet another test, is to Safe Boot, (by holding down the Shift key at start for about 30 seconds) and see if the problems go away. Note that Safe Boot will disable wireless internet; wired internet will still work.
If either, 4 or 5 fix things, then the problem is likely a program you are loading at login. (See Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts, Login Items tab.)