Beachball of doom

[sportsfan1234]

I am a fairly new mac user. I have had my MBP since august and love it. I am also an extremely basic user. Browsing, Poker, Music, Torrents, Email. I have 4gb of ram on my hard drive but am starting to get the stupid Beachball more and more frequently. Is this a ram issue? I feel like for such a new computer i shouldnt need to have to upgrade to 8gb of ram so soon. I am also aware of that having multiple programs open at the same time can affect your computers performance but i also check to make sure i don't have more than 2-3 running...like i said i am a basic user so i'm not sure what the problem could be....all advice is appreciated

 

[docal97]

When is the situation occurring? You have a new computer and you really don't have much going on that should give you the spinning ball.

Have you monitored your background process' thru activity monitor to see what programs are using the most resources?

You should also go into disk utility to repair your permissions.

Please report back- you also have the option of getting it checked at the Apple store to let them run diagnostics on your machine.

 

[sportsfan1234]

Have you monitored your background process' thru activity monitor to see what programs are using the most resources? - No, I don't even know how to do that.

You should also go into disk utility to repair your permissions.- what does that do ???

I am very new with mac and a newb with computers in general. i do have a lot of tabs open sometimes but still i close them out and it can be slow...