27" quadcore imac problem..

I have a problem with my 27" imac..it seems to be a little sluggish and slow to react and I am thinking it might be time to do some spring cleaning.

is there anyway of doing this or is it not necessary for a mac?

also I noticed my mac won't turn on ( just a constant white screen) UNLESS I remove ALL USB devices, then it turns on. I am deeply concerned my mac is going all 'windows' on me, I switched o a mac form windows simply because I didn't want to deal with this nonsense any more!

all help gratefully recieved

What tasks seem to indicate that your iMac is sluggish? Are these tasks you've done in the past and were faster? A few examples would help..

There is always Onyx if you wanted to clean things up.

Requiring that all USB devices are unplugged to boot up is not correct, what kinds of devices do you have plugged in anyway?

Remember..the most information you give us about your setup/problem, the better we can help you..don't make us guess..

Regards

Onyx
Titanium Software
And pick the version of it for the version of OS X you have. That is probably one of the best spring cleaning applications out there for the Mac and it's OS X. Give that a go and see if you see any improvements.

+1 for each of my friends who recommended Onyx. It'll do some maintenance. It will also ask you to verify a couple of things when it first runs. Verify your hard disk (it told me mine needed to be repaired, even though I hadn't noticed any issues with performance). You may have to reboot from your OS disc to repair the hard disk, but that's alright. I did it and my computer is actually running much more quickly now.

Hi..the software I use routinely that I have noticed slowing down are Adobe lightroom and Photoshop CS4. My mac is running Mac OS X 10.6.2

The USB devices I attach are 2x western digital passport drives 500gb each.

I will try Onyx..thanks for all the help so far!

Do you have at least 5-10% free space on your main hard drive?
And you you have enough space on the hard drive you choose to be your swap disc in photoshop/lightroom?

I have about 600gb of hard disk space on my computer hard disk and about 300gb on each of the 500gb western digital passport drives...

thanks to everyone..i had to repair my disk using the cd that came with my mac, ran Onyx and everything seems to be much faster now