iMac is frozen

Hello. The imac i have is about a year old. It has been giving me grief lately and has been getting slower and slower. Now i finally figured that i should back up all the important files onto a different memory device and then bring the mac in to get the harddrive wiped clean. The mac took about half an hour to start up and when it finally did start up i clicked on finder and it hasent responded for atleast an hour. How do i get my files off of there?

You could try target mode (you need two macs and the one thats not in target mode needs more space than your user folder takes up) start up the slow imac, and hold T, make sure you have your other mac connected by a firewire 800 to you slow imac, and once you see the screen go blue (from my memory) and it has a big yellow firewire symbol you can let go of T. On your other mac your slow mac should come up as an external hard drive, go into it, find the users folder and in that it should say *name*'s iMac or something like that. drag that folder on you other mac, or you can have another extern hard drive connected and drag it to that. Once it copies, eject your slow imac and, well... do whatever you have to do.