If you suspect you might have hardware troubles, here are two things worth doing (after reading my two earlier posts):
The first step is to look through the disks and/or USB stick that came with your Mac when you bought it. Among these, or coexisting on one of them, should be a Hardware test
(note, I am on vacation right now, but when I get back home I will make pictures of how this might look).
Boot your Mac using it and run the hardware test. Note the results of it.
If your Mac seems like its drunk or drugged and moves veeeery slowly, and you have not yet started any heavy programs or you have closed all that were, you might still have demanding programs that run in the background. You can try to run the Mac in "safe mode". If your Mac automatically logs in, you must reboot and then as soon as you see the blue wallpaper colour or your wallpaper, immideately press and hold down the Shift key (the one to get big letters) until your desktop fully appears.
If you login to your Mac, immideately after entering your password or clicking your picture, hold down the shift key until your desktop appears.
Does your Mac appear to run faster now?
If this didn't help, it might be worth checking the health state of your disk. First, in the /Applications folder is a subfolder "Utilities" and within that is "Disk Utility". Click the grey disk icon (not the volume icon usually titled Macintosh HD, but the one above). Then look down at the bottom right, at "S.M.A.R.T Status", it should say Verified, if not, look at "My disk is failing" below.
If it says verified, but you steal fear disk problems, you can do an additional test using a 3rd party utility:
I used this tool to confirm my last disk problem:
http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php
Note, you do NOT need to buy the tool to get a quick indication. It will run 4 times or 29 days in trial mode (it's designed to detect a negative trend), but it asks the disk more deeply than the MacOS itself does what its condition is like and can do other tests.
Download it, double click to unzip it, then start it up. You should see your disk on the left as "Macintosh HD" or similar. Look at the health colour indicator on the lower right. If its green, that means that the disk is "likely" fine, but we need to do two deeper tests. Above the health indicator is a small panel named Tests and the button "More Info". You should click the button and perform at least a Short run test on the disk. Note that the disk will be very noisy during this test. The test is not destructive.
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