If its a new Imac and its always been sluggish then it could very easily be you need some more ram to really enjoy your computer experience. If however you are just now experiencing a slowdown after having owned the mac for a month or two then you might consider bringing the computer into a Mac Store for them to diagnose if there is a hardware failure. Hard Drive Failure is a pretty common thing and it can happen even if the computer is fairly new.
If its a new Imac and its always been sluggish then it could very easily be you need some more ram to really enjoy your computer experience. If however you are just now experiencing a slowdown after having owned the mac for a month or two then you might consider bringing the computer into a Mac Store for them to diagnose if there is a hardware failure. Hard Drive Failure is a pretty common thing and it can happen even if the computer is fairly new.
The Activity Monitor application can tell you whether or not the amount of RAM you have is enough. But if you want help on how to do that, you have to actually follow directions.
The Disk Utility application can tell you if your hard drive is likely to fail -- when you open it up, click on the drive (on the left), and at the very bottom, there will be a line that says, "SMART Status." If it says anything other than verified, you have a problem. Note that it doesn't appear until you click on the drive in the left.
Both of these applications are in your utilities folder....