Why is it sooooo slow

Question

I just got one of the brand new Intel macs, fastest one. It is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo slow! I tried doing a simple photoshop job and it took a long time to load and after that there was slight lag, if I changed the opacity it would take about 1.5secs to change what I see. On my Athlon 64 with 512mb of ram and a Geforce 6200 PCI it has no lag and I can even do my 3D modeling under windows fine. (I am using bootcamp for one 3D modeling)
And its not jsut Photoshop just going down to the dock has lag, it does pretty much everything this guy talks about in this video
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6553260189868317794
That is almost exactly how I feel, I sent it back to where I got it and they said it was running normal.
iMac   Mac OS X (10.4.7)   It *****

Answer 1

Hello,
If you have had your machine for a month, then there is no reason that Spotlight would be causing your performance delay.
And, you are beyond your return period.
So, your options at this point are to get it repaired if there is a defect, find the software problem if that is the issue, or sell it if it cannot meet your needs.
For trouble-shooting:
First, make sure that there isn't a corrupt cache or even maintenance tasks that have been left unperformed.
You can perform almost all maintenance tasks from a single spot in the free utility OnyX.
http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html
Just perform all the cleaning tasks and all of the maintenance tasks in that program (basically check all the options and run routine). Make sure you also run the "repair permissions" option.
Then, see if after performing each of those options if your performance feels better.
Note: You may elect not to perform the task (uncheck the box) that clears out old mail downloads / attachments if you don't want to risk losing any old items in your e-mail folder. The rest of the options don't do anything that would cause you to lose anything.
Beyond that, you could run a benchmark to compare your performance against that of people running the same system and configuration as yourself.
http://www.xbench.com/
You can see other Intel system results here:
http://db.xbench.com/search.xhtml?text=intel
Look at the iMac Intel CoreDuo's in that list and find ones that are very close or identical to your configuration. Make sure you are comparing systems with the same speed processor as yours.
Click on each system in the list to see a break-down of the results for each individual category (hard drive, memory, graphics, processor, etc.).
Compare your numbers against those numbers and see if your system performs comparably to systems with the same processor and memory configuration as your system (each persons system information should be included with their results).
That might give you an idea of where your system fits in terms of other systems.
Also, to get the most accurate results in your test, run the benchmark immediately after a restart. You don't want anything else running while performing the benchmark tests. You want the entire system free to run the test so you get accurate numbers.
Anyway, see what you find out. This might help you to determine if you are seeing performance comparable to others.
If your results come in comparable to the others, then you know that the machine is working properly. That would tell you that it just isn't meeting your expectations.
If the numbers for your system are dramatically lower than the others like your system, then you may need to investigate and see why your particular system is not performing as well.
I hope this helps.