Leann, were you able to query the database to see which tables could be large? Performance of an 8.2 site should be fairly good. Starting with looking at the table size is typically the first thing I do. Second thing is the configuration of the site.
Is it properly configured from a settings standpoint?
If the slowness is only in the Pages application, are the webparts and page templates properly configured? Meaning, do you have all the properties filled out which need to be filled out. For instance, we recently worked on a project where the client had about 10 universal viewers on the master page displaying the data from the currently selected page.
In the universal viewer the only property set was the transformation. If you read the property tool tips, you'll find out the universal viewer will create and run a huge query against all the page types if the page type is not defined. The Kentico Admin UI pages were taking between 4 and 5 minutes to load, generating about 185MB of data on one query and another 65MB of data on another query for each page load. Once I changed those universal viewers out to static text webparts with macros for data retrieval, the Kentico Admin UI pages loaded in less than 5 seconds.