I have a 2008 IMAC that was a great machine until November of 2011 when it started to slow down and I got my first glimpse of the beach ball. things progressively got worse and by the end of December it would no longer boot. I took it in and the store told me that they had to wipe the Hard drive and start fresh. After doing so they said it tested fine. I took it home and re installed some of my software, Microsoft Office and Adobe creative suite 4, but the computer couldn't handle it and it would no longer boot again. I have repeated the process 3 times with the store geniuses and they keep telling me that once they re format the drive and re install the OS that everything tests out fine. I am not using time machine or restoring any significant amour of data just a few word documents and PDF files that I need to be able to email. I never even got to do a simple task with Adobe. In fact this time I didn't even load it again. I was running regular Leopard and so after the third failure I finally installed Snow Leopard on a new install fresh. It lasted a whole 2 days and now I can only boot via the disk utility again. Checking verbose mode told me that the same problems as usual were occurring again. What in the world is going on that the HD keeps becoming trashed?