How to diagnose beach balling and overall slowdowns in Lion.

[GameGuru38]

I bought the Mac Mini in my signature for my wife as is, I haven't done any upgrades to it short of a clean install of Lion from USB thumb drive. Trying to do things will beach ball it often or just hang. Browsing the web in Safari, Chrome (no longer supported) and Opera is slow. How do I diagnose what the issue is? I am thinking the SSD might be nearing end of life or the WiFi chip is dying (isn't anywhere near router to try a direct connect with CAT5 cable). Just wondering how to diagnose the issue.

 

[Hellhammer]

The first step would be to open Activity Monitor to see if there are any processes taking excess amounts of CPU, memory or disk performance. WiFi shouldn't result in beach balling but merely just slow browsing speed (i.e. pages take long to load). With that said, it's an 8-year-old computer, so the performance won't be great regardless of what you do.

 

[JohnDS]

Have you run Verify Disk using Disk Utility?