New iMac i7 sluggish with Call of Duty 4 - low CPU usage

Hi All,
I'm a recent convert from PC to Mac.
I'm running a new iMac i7 (2.8Ghz, 8Gb, 1TB, ATI HD4850, OS X 10.6.5 ) with not much software on it.
Call of Duty 4 modern warfare runs really great and very smooth.
However, when I pause the game and go to the desktop (to check my gmail for example) - then the computer runs very very slow (like everything is moving in slow motion) - if I click to open a new tab on Chrome or Firefox then there is a delay of about 2 seconds until the tab opens, if I move the mouse cursor from side to side over the dock - then the Dock magnification is happening in slow motion etc.
I have checked the CPU usage and it's only at 36% - which I think is not much.
The memory usage is:
Free 859 MB
Wired: 585 MB
Active: 1.34 GB
Inactive: 5.24GB
Used: 7.15GB
VM Size 159.05 GB
Page ins: 4.61GB
PAge outs: 772kb
Swap used: 5.3 MB
So why is the computer so slow?
Should it grind to a halt when running a game in the background?
This doesn't happen on my PC normally.
Would highly appreciate your thought/comments/suggestions.
Message was edited by: DutchGamer

I think the reason is you don't have enough RAM for the about of apps you are running. Your system shows 859 MB free which really isn't that much if you are gaming. If you upgrade to 12 GB I believe the system will be fine. If you don't want to upgrade then when gaming I'd close everything else, especially web browsers as all of them continually use more and more RAM. Personally I use Safari (but I also have Chrome, Firefox and Opera on my system) and find that closing it from time to time saves RAM. What is occurring is a system running low on RAM resorts to RAM swapping and also uses HD space to swap so when it's going through these processes what you see are slow downs.
Roger

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