iMac completely slow and relatively unusable.

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Hello I am new to the forums and only joined in light of my resent struggles. My family has had our iMac for about 4 years now and it used to be our main computer. But we all now have our own personal laptops and it's generally not used except for some times when my little sister needs to do school work but lately it has not been running well at all. I am not all that computer savvy but I know a decent amount about computers, but I just can't figure out what to do to get our computer running like it used to. It has a 250 gb harddrive, 1 gb memory, and 2.0 GHz (T7300) Intel Core 2 Duo with 4MB on-chip L2 cache. What the main problem is just overall functionality. It'll turn on and we are able to log on to any of the user accounts but when we do it takes about 10-15 minutes to load, and half of the time everything will load but none of the applications will start and the other half of the time the applications will load but the computer will freeze completely after 20 minutes of use. I'm thinking of just completely wiping the drive and rebooting the computer, but I would need to back up the files. The computer won't recognize any of the external harddrives I try to use or any flash drives, and besides I can't even open up finder to obtain anything. Any help at all is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Various Mac's
Sounds very sick, with a strong possibility your hard drive is failing.

If you can't backup to an external drive, can you mount the iMac through target firewire mode to your laptop if it's a Mac?

Have you tried booting from the original install DVD and running Disk Utility repair disk?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook Air M1 2020 Ventura 13.4.1 500Gb 8Gb. iPhone12, Watch 5, HomePods.
Hello and welcome,

These symptoms look like you may have faulty or poorly seated Ram. Check the slot to make sure the Ram chip is seated correctly first, remove it and re-seat as per instructions available on the Apple Support site iMac: How to remove or install memory

You could also download some software for checking the chip's integrity. MemTest for Mac is recommended but if you are have stability problems it might not be the best solution at this stage.

Edit: sorry Steve you beat me to it there:)
 

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