Late 2006 iMac HDD Problems?

[Ditton]

Hey all, long time reader here who's just signed up. I've got a late 2006 iMac (iMac 5,1) 2.16 C2D, 2GB RAM, that's suddenly begun to slow to a crawl.

I had Leopard installed and 1GB of RAM in it until a day ago - it was slowing to a crawl at points so I decided to upgrade the RAM to 2GB and do a fresh install of Snow Leopard.

Basically it took about 4 hours to install Snow Leopard. Once I was in and trying to do different things (updates, downloads, launching apps) it basically locks up.

I went to Activity Monitor and watched the read/writes while waiting for programs to launch - data rates were very sporadic and at times non-existent even when apps were still trying to launch.

Basically - I'm thinking it's the HDD - Just wanted to check with you guys to see what you all think.

Thanks!

[Hellhammer]

Have you ran Disk Utility? Sounds like dead HD though