Why do i get the beach-ball with my setup?

[crazycat]

I am using a 24" 2.8 GHz intel core 2 duo iMac with 4 GB of RAM, the thing is fast but why do i get the beach-ball when i am using Safari or firefox? It is not like i am doing anything else at the moment, i just find it strange.

 

[mad jew]

Hard to say... Keep Activity Monitor open on the side and check with it to see where all your resources (CPU and RAM) are being used when it starts to beachball. Make sure you're looking at All Processes, not just the default My Processes.