Unresponsive and Slow

[originalvector]

My mother's iMac is sick. The problem is, I am in California and she is in Texas. I will try and provide as much information that I gathered from her and maybe someone can help me out.

Upon booting up the iMac, it is fine for the first 10 minutes or so. After that, programs start to become very slow, to the point where checking her mac mail is impossible. She said when she tries to do anything, she will get the Color Wheel for minutes before it finally resolves it self.

I know its not alot of detail but thats about the most I could get from her on the phone.

The iMac is from about 2003 and has started having this problem in the last months.

Thanks a million!

 

[mad jew]

Very tricky to diagnose the problem 'cause the symptoms are so general. As a start, I'd use the restore discs to verify and possibly repair the hard drive. After that I'd create a new user account and see if the same problems happen there. Does she have plenty of free space on her boot drive? Does she have any third party peripherals plugged in?

 

[originalvector]

Very tricky to diagnose the problem 'cause the symptoms are so general. As a start, I'd use the restore discs to verify and possibly repair the hard drive. After that I'd create a new user account and see if the same problems happen there. Does she have plenty of free space on her boot drive? Does she have any third party peripherals plugged in?

hey mad jew

i appreciate you repyling, i tried to get as much detail as i could but my mom is not super computer literate. Hence why I recommended she get a mac in the first place =P

She does have plenty of space, but that is a good idea about a new user account. I will ask her to do that tomorrow and get back to you. The only peripheral i know if is a usb adapter for reading SD cards but i will ask her to remove it.

Thanks again!

 

[mad jew]

Fantastic. This is very good of you to do all this for her. Don't forget to ask her to verify the drive with Disk Utility.