Reinstall

Hi: My iMac seems quite sluggish, and I'm wondering if a reinstall of Snow Leopard would speed things up. Any advice/thoughts will be appreciated.
2.4GHz; 4GB of RAM

Yea with SL you can do a re-install which by default will Archive and Install...
But have you tried other fixes yet, as Repair Disk Permissions.
I recommend the A&I only if trouble shooting hasnt worked for you..
Can you give examples as to the meaning of "sluggish" and have you tried troubleshooting ??

Cheers

Yes, I've tried the permissions route. Sluggish" the pinwheel spins almost every time I open an app.

Yea well if you have backed up your HD to a Ext HD, go ahead and drop in the SL disk and in 40 mins you will back with us, with no spinning wheel ..
It will speed things up BC what you are doing is putting it in clean.
But back up and they say to repair permissions and empty trash before install and after the install repair permissions again .....

Yes, I've tried the permissions route. Sluggish" the pinwheel spins almost every time I open an app.

Click to expand...

What's running in the background? Have you opened your Activity Monitor to see if anything is eating up your memory and the CPU?

Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor.app

Reinstalling is a drastic step and may not resolve the problem.

Regards.

Reinstalling a UNIX-based OS is rarely necessary. This is a habit that many of us bring from Windows, but it's usually not necessary. There are lots of things you can do to improve the performance. Start here and let us know how you make out.

Thanks to all! A combination of your various advice, along with the app MainMenu, has solved my problems.