time for OS upgrade?

I have a 4 year old Mac running Leopard 10.5.8 and it's becoming somewhat enraging. It has never performed like I thought an Apple machine would, but things like page-loading speeds are slowing to a crawl. I'm constantly waiting for that "spinning rainbow" to stop. Is this a space issue? It's a 1 GB machine but I can't seem to find how much space is left on the hard drive. There are a lot of photos and music files on the computer. (I subscribe to ICloud for the music files.)

My entire Apple experience has been a disappointment so far, but I'm wondering if upgrading to Mountain Lion would help here.

Any advice would be appreciated.

The upgrade will not help on its own

Your free space is indicated at the bottom of the fonder window when you open up the hard drive icon

And more ram will certainly help a lot, what model of Mac is it

Welcome to Mac-Forums

In my opinion, people who have a machine they are happy with under their current OS have the best experience when upgrading. Before we suggest an upgrade, let's first fix what is ailing your current machine.

Can you go to About this Mac under the Apple logo on the top left an tell us what it says as far as your Mac is and how much memory you have. Also open up Finder and look at the status bar at the bottom and tell us how much disk space you have free.

Assuming you have 1GB of memory, your Mac might be able to use up to 4GB of memory and if so, the upgrade will make a big difference in overall performance. The next thing is to ensure that you have ample free space. Next is to run a program like OnyX and have it clean things out for you. Lastly, running Disk Utility to repair permissions might be a good thing.

Let's start with this and see where to go from here..

this is indicative of my problem: it's taken me this long to get back to this thread.

Thanks for your responses. My machine is the Imac 20-inch 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2Duo. 1 GB. It's showing
121.61 GB free.

So, it's not a space issue since you have plenty of free space.

If you haven't already, make use of OnyX to perform some maintenance. Make sure to get the version for Leopard.

Once that's installed, run the "Automation" - that wil clean out a variety of things that might be slowing you down.

Many thanks. I'll give that a try.

It's the RAM. You don't have enough. 1GB doesn't meet the minimum stated requirements for Mountain Lion. The cheapest and probably most effective thing you can do to speed up your machine is add more RAM. The most likely reason your having to wait for everything is your machine is have to write everything to a page file instead of loading it in RAM. Opening web pages, documents, most everything is meant to be performed in memory (RAM). Doesn't matter what OS.

If it's really four years old (2008) then you should be able to easily and inexpensively upgrade the RAM to 4GB or possibly more. At current prices I would say investing in the RAM may give you a few more years out of that machine, so it's a very good investment.

If you can give us any specifics on your model we can look up what the RAM capacity is and advise further.

lack of RAM is your issue, the upgrade to 4gb is really inexpensive and your machine will be much quicker. Upgrade your RAM before doing an OS X upgrade because the newer versions of OS X have larger RAM requirements to meet. Also try out Mountain Lion at an Apple store or on a friends computer because like a lot of people you may prefer the Leopard/Snow Leopard generation to the Lion/Mtn. Lion stuff.

Thanks for the suggestions. I suspected it might be a RAM issue but it's good to have confirmation from people who clearly know more about this than I do. I ran that OnyX utility but it only seems (so far) to have helped a little, so I'll look into upgrading the RAM.

My computer runs the 2.0 GHz processor Intel Core 2Duo. Currently showing 120.1 GB free

Hi KentN...My input is my opinion only...max out your RAM to the max for Snow Leopard OS. Buy the RAM online and install it yourself. I am not hardware savvy...but on my Mac Mini I did it myself and it truly was a piece of cake. Then upgrade the OS to 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). Work with that until you can make a new hardware purchase. This way, I feel you will get the most out of what you have and buy some time until a new computer is absolutely necessary. Just my $0.02 worth...Dogbreath