Apple :: Imac Is Dying Or Mac OS X

One day as I'm turning on the computer (2008 imac) somebody (not going to say who) decides to just turn the computer off just about 3-4 seconds after I clicked the power button. When I booted up the computer again many things were wrong.

1. The computer runs extremely slow, both in my windows and mac partitions, I've pretty much concluded that this is hard drive problem since it takes forever to load applications and they run slow if and when they do finally load up.

2. Boot time is much greater, takes several minutes to fully boot up either of the partitions.

So I basically try to figure out what was wrong. I perform disk repair and verify disk operations from the disk utility, and the problem persists. I reinstall the mac OS (Leopard) with the archiving option. The problems still persist. It gets to a point where I can no longer even boot into the mac partition and if I try it keeps restarting itself.

One time a no smoking sign came up without the cigarette (if that makes sense). The windows partition continues to run even slower. Sometimes I can't even log in to my account on the windows side and the computer freezes up. Eventually I ended wiping the mac partition completely and doing a fresh install of Leopard. It fixed the problem somewhat but I feel the mac isn't running as fast it was before and there are other problems. If I update to 10.5.8 the update fails with an error saying something about airport scripts.....