Problem with iMac freezing up.

Okay, for about a month now I've been having major problems with my iMac.

The computer is only about a year old and I've never had any problems with it whatsoever. Then, I got a new printer and when I installed it, the entire computer went crazy and wouldn't reboot. The start up screen froze up and wouldn't do anything and none of the fixes suggested to me worked so I went ahead and reformatted. It seemed to fix the problem at first (I didn't bother reinstalling the printer just yet) until a software update appeared and asked me to update to a newer version of OS X. I did, but it froze up again and didn't completely install, then rebooted on its own and I had the same problem. I had to reformat again.

I've had to reformat the computer about 7 times or so now. I'd had windows installed via bootcamp but I unpartitioned the harddrive and all that to see if for some reason windows had been causing issues but apparently this wasn't the case at it was still messed up.

Now, it reached a point where it didn't want to detect the harddrive at all so, out of frustration, I partitioned it again and now it will read one volume.

This volume seemed to be doing ok. A little slow, irritatingly laggish, but I accepted it as long as the computer would run. Then yesterday, I decided to be a little daring and intsalled Photoshop.

Big mistake. Now, the computer is so slow I can barely open a browser to go to a website or anything. I have no idea what the problem is but I want to fix it!

I personally suspect that the harddrive itself is just shot but to be sure, I'm going to ask people who know more than me.

I'm not sure what information anyone would need to know about the computer so I copied a bit from the box, as I can't even use the computer presently to get any other specifics. (I rebooted about an hour ago and it's still loading. )

2.16 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
4 MB shared L2 cache
1 GB of 667MHZ DDR2 SDRAM
250 GB Serial ATA harddrive

Let me know if you need to know anything else and if anything up there seems weird, it's possible that I misread my own handwriting.

Thanks in advance!
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