Slow Responses/ Hangs up

Question

Especially on the internet, much of the time, operations are very very slow, the mouse cursor "thinks" for 20-30 seconds very often.  I have checked the hard-drive via disk verify and nothings comes back as broken.  What could be wrong?

Answer 1

Do you have enough free space on the startup disk?  As a minimum, about 10% (preferably more) of the total capacity should be free space.  The OS uses the free space for its virtual memory "swap" files, and other temporary files.  Apps like Safari make extensive use of free space for "cache" files.  When free space becomes low, what is left gets fragmented into smaller and smaller pieces spread over the hard drive, making it difficult for the OS and apps to access it efficiently.
If you have not restarted in a while, do so now.  Does it operate better, immediately after a restart?
Another good test is to create a new user account, in System Preferences.  For Snow Leopard, I think that's the Accounts or Users and Groups pane.  Log out and log in to the new user account.  Make sure you log out to the login screen; do not use Fast User Switching.  Does the system operate better in the new user account.  If it does, there may be something wrong in your current user account.  It could be a background process that runs in your normal account, that uses a lot of resources.  It could be unusual or corrupted user preference settings.  If the problem recurs, then the cause is probably with the overall system or hardware.