System Hangs After A While: Processor or Hard Drive?

I have a Early 2008 iMac that works fine for the first 30 or so minutes then begins to hang or show the beach ball of death (BBOD), especially when I try running two or more programs at the same time. I can be doing something with iTunes and try to open Safari and it will literally hang for several seconds (sometimes minutes). I can try to open Activity Monitor but it too will hang. Eventually the second program will open then Activity Monitor (3rd program) will eventually pop up. Sometime Activity Monitor will open first and will indicate the second opened program, like Safari, is unresponsive so I use Quit Process to stop the software from opening/starting.
As I mentioned, this is after I've been on the iMac for say 30-40 minutes. I have recently updated my SDRAM as I had read a thread that the dreaded BBOD was indicative of faulty memory and sure enough, I found by running Apple's Hardware Test that the original 1 GB of SDRAM was bad so I replaced it with 2 GB which brought me up to 4 GB. I run AppleJack periodically, just to keep the Permissions and Verifications happy.
After several hanging episodes, I ran TechTool Deluxe and the software runs through its entire process and when it gets to Volume Structure, it will run through the entire test and just when it gets to the end, I'll see a quick flash of Fail but the report will finish and the written report will say it Passed (?!)
Since it takes awhile for the hanging symptoms to appear, I'm wondering if its heat-related. But I'm not sure if it could be the processor or the hard drive itself. I will say my internal optical drive died some time ago (that was a long iMac Discussion thread that I too wrote in bemoaning the demise of my iMac's optical drive and it appeared several other iMac owners had the same issue too).
BTW, the Apple Hardware Test passed the processor and hard drive. And I apologize if this sounds similar to the Apple Discussions Intel-based iMac thread _System Hangs, Freezes iMac 8,1_ but I haven't upgraded my OS to 10.6 (and that seemed to be a current theme) so I didn't chime in on that thread.

I have checked the S.M.A.R.T. status in Disk Utility and it does say Verified. I also verified Disk Permissions and while it took a little time, it eventually worked its way through it.
Then I ran AHT and it passed. Then I ran it in the extended mode and the computer locked up after about two minutes.
I was able to borrow a USB drive installed with Apple Service Diagnostic (OS) for my generation of iMac and booted to it. I ran some tests, with one of them being a hard drive test, which it failed. So I think I have my answer. Thanks for your suggestions.

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Good day,
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First of all, you would need to make sure that your server meets the hardware requirements to run Windows Server 2012 + the applications you use.
For Windows Server 2012 System Requirements, you can refer to that: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn303418.aspx
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This posting is provided AS IS with no warranties or guarantees , and confers no rights.
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http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-system/windows-7-restore-from-image-wont-recognize/ce8e3d0a-236d-4eff-8370-c171d2dfa555?tm=1333929198413&page=1#footer
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System Hangs After A While: Processor or Hard Drive?

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