My friend's Mac has been having a lot of difficulties relatively recently. It frequently freezes for several minutes at a time. From what I have seen, this happens when it is told to transfer data from one location to another. Opening programs, downloading things from the internet, etc. Just about anything that has to do with accessing information seems to be causing issues. Starting processes takes a while, but they (mostly) run seamlessly after they've been started up. It took several minutes to start playing music on WQXR.org, but it doesn't stop after it's been started, it took a while to start a Youtube video, but it played just fine after it had started until I tried to close it, where Safari froze, the Activity Monitor took a long time to open, and frequently freezes, various menus that are a part of the OS take a while to open, and render everything but the mouse unresponsive while opening, but operate fine after they're been opened, etc.
The Activity Monitor is frequently freezing, so it's difficult to be certain, but apart from small spikes, both the processor and the memory seem to be fine. The Hard Drive has over 100 GB available, the computer has 1 GB of memory and a 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5 processor. The OS is Mac OS X version 10.5.8. I'm hoping that someone here can offer a solution, as I haven't found anything that can help. Programs are frequently unresponsive, but they free up again after a few minutes. We're not sure how old the computer itself is, just that he bought it on Ebay last October, and that these issues have been occurring for the past month.
From what I can tell, the computer has a wired internet connection, and I haven't been able to find an antivirus program on it, so that could be the issue, but I am not certain.