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.