MacBooks <3 Beachballs

[VaDor]

My friend had a 2.0 ghz Core Duo MacBook about a year back. It liked to randomly beachball. "That sucks," I thought.
Now, lately, mine has been beachballing a lot. And I can't figure out why. It's very hard to pinpoint since it's been doing it across formats (which were unrelated, but I noticed it nonetheless).
I asked my brother, his MacBook is only a couple months old. His has been beachballing a lot, too. So has my boyfriend's.

So what the hell? Do MacBooks just like to beachball? It's incredibly annoying and seems to do it at any given moment for no apparent reason.
My machine has 2GB ram, too, so it's not like I'm pagefiling a lot.

For your case I advise a fresh install of Mac OS X. Sometimes just starting from the beginning is better than trying to repare some freaky random beachballs

 

[Fahrwahr]

My MB always seems to beachball when I am clicking OK trying to open/save a file in Firefox :

Haven't noticed it so much in Safari. Anyone else?

You might want to check the Download Manager window to see if the list has gotten excessively long. I've found that whenever Firefox's or SeaMonkey's downloads list has gotten extremely long, the computer can beachball for a moment trying to add a new entry for the current download. Either pare it down manually or wipe out the whole thing. (If Firefox itself won't let you do it within the program -- the software may beachball as usual -- you might want to go into your profile folder and delete the file downloads.rdf to force Firefox to create a new one when you start Firefox again.)