G4 iMac slow after fresh reinstall

I have a g4 17" imac 80gb HD, 600-something mb of ram, and 800mhz. Computer seemed to work fine for a while until recently it has began to really slow down. Coming from the PC world the first thing I did was grab the install disks and reformat/reinstall OS 10.4.11 Once I ran apple update and everything I would expect the computer to be like new however, it's still very slow.

For example: with safari open and just browsing simple text websites (google) the activity monitor shows my CPU usage at 100%. If i try to watch any kind of flash it will skip like crazy making my cpu go up along with it. The ram memory seems okay, with 300mb or so free after bootup.

I ran the verify/permission under disk utility but that didn't seem to do much. The main use of the computer is for voice video chat through skype & email. However, when the skype video is launched the computer keeps skipping.

Any help? I'm somewhat new to troublshooting mac's, but I have a feeling it might a hardware problem. I appreciate any ideas. Thanks

Big-TDI-Guy said:

New install... is your spotlight done indexing? That'll suck up resources until it's finished.

Click to expand...

I would assume so, how would I check?

Just an update, it seems to be running slightly better with skype. I'm thinking its a piece of hardware that's on its way out (harddrive/ram). Flash still makes the machine drag. even small flash like running speakeasy speed test causes the animation to skip.