I have an Intel Core duo that also seems to be slow - sometimes with as my spinning beachballs as my old iMac G3 it replaced - when I've looked at Activity Monitor, I've sometimes found Microsoft Database Daemon to be the culprit - I guess it's running in rosetta - but what really irritates me is that it relates to entourage which I've never used but which is installed as part of MS Office - I'm now waiting for my Leopard disks to arrive to do a clean install to see if getting rid of the Mocrosoft Cruft will speed things up
My old G3 iMac is just about managing to cope with working these days and I am definitely planning on upgrading come January (basically once the upgrade to iLife, which usually comes out in january is available)
The main thing that's concerning me though is that once you upgrade to Intel, Classic and any OS 9 legacy programs you have are dead and buried - I have a few OS 9 games and things I would like to carry on being able to use and don't like the thought of losing my backwards compatibility.
So I guess, I'll be buying at least one more generation of PPC architecture before going with the shift to Intel
Don't Give Me More Speed, Give Me Efficiency
Should You Buy A Mac Now?