my imac is crashing dont know why

[treads]

this just started about a month or two ago where my imac will run like crap. I cant open more then three things without it running super slow it crashes safari and firefox all the time. cant watch a youtube video, it always seems like its buffering. cant look at my pics on this thing because it just runs and runs and runs when it stops ill move the mouse a little and it starts running again. ( the little time icon come on) anyway if this is something that someone knows about please let me know the fix. thanks in advance.

 

[TMRaven]

Check cpu usage and ram usage to see if there's any frequent cpu hangs or constant paging out of the ram. My bet is that it's a failing hard drive.

 

[mannix87]

whats kind of iMac do you have & RAM capacity?

 

[treads]

whats kind of iMac do you have & RAM capacity?

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: IM51.0090.B09
SMC Version: 1.9f4


Size: 512 MB
Type: DDR2 SDRAM
Speed: 667 MHz
Status: OK

 

[TMRaven]

Tell us your current page ins and outs under memory in activity monitor. This number is best read when the computer has had a long uptime with plenty of use, rather than a fresh reboot.

 

[treads]

Tell us your current page ins and outs under memory in activity monitor. This number is best read when the computer has had a long uptime with plenty of use, rather than a fresh reboot.

pages ins and outs is....116321/17646

 

[TMRaven]

Altho that's a rather high amount of page outs for your page ins-- which means you need more ram-- it still shouldn't be enough of a reason to cause all the problems you described. It might be the combination of hard drive and ram.

How full is your hard drive?

 

[treads]

Altho that's a rather high amount of page outs for your page ins-- which means you need more ram-- it still shouldn't be enough of a reason to cause all the problems you described. It might be the combination of hard drive and ram.

How full is your hard drive?

it says space utilized 105.63 gb space free 126.94gb. to me tht sounds like its pretty free. I do have alot of pics in folders and such now that I think about it it started when I put a couple hundred pics in but after I saw how slow it was I removed over 3000 pics and that left me with a little over 1000 pics in iphoto. I guess I just need some more ram, but I still dont understand why everything is crashing (video) the only thing that seems to work well is hulu.

 

[smithrh]

Like someone else mentioned, I'd suspect a failing hard disk.

Open up Console (Apps -> Utilities -> Console)

Click on the "All Messages" text under "Database Searches" on the left hand side.

If there's any message reading "I/O failure" then the disk is on the way out.