New IMAC slowing down with spinning ball

I've had my MAC for about 3 weeks (I switched from a PC). Today it started slowing down. First whe n I tried to print something and then when I was in Excel (Office for MAC 2004). Both times it didn't do anything for a minute and then the clorful spinning ball thing appeared. About a minute later it finished what I was doing (saving a template file).
I looked at the system memory and I have 2GB of RAM with an OK status. I have two printers - one USB attached to my MAC and the other on another computer (Windows) that I am sharing. This was not a problem before, so I don't expect this to be the issue, but I figured I'd mention it anyway.
I haven't bought virus software yet - perhaps I have a virus?
Any help or thoughts would be appreciated.

Macs don't get viruses, so you can rule that out. Do you have any shared drives or network connections? Something there could be slowing things down. If you do have some connections, try disconnecting them and see if that speeds up your access. When was the last time you rebooted the machine? You could always try that.
There is a utility in applications\utilities called "Activity Monitor". You could look there to see if anything is hogging the memory or processor. Have you installed anything recently?

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