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Have you Reset Safari? It is found when you click on Safari. Choose your options. It may speed up your Safari.

Thanks, Ghostdancer, I haven't tried that and I will.

Kythera,

A couple of points. Your Mac should operate well with 1GB of RAM when you first turn it on, but will grind to a slow crawl if you try to have many apps open at once. Expanding to at least 2GB would be well worth the cost. To see where you are on memory at any given time, open the Activity Monitor app and see how much of the RAM usage pie is green. If you only have a tiny slice of green, you will have slowdowns. Restarting will restore about half the pie to green in your case.

Also, I recommend against ever turning off your Mac with the power switch or by pulling the cord. You may get away with it most of the time, but there's a good chance of eventually scrambling something if you make a habit of that. If you forget the keyboard shortcut for Force Quit, just click on the Finder icon in the Dock and then select Apple Menu > Force Quit... The Finder rarely is the cause of a beachball, so it's usually responsive. Basically, any app that's not hanging will afford you the Apple menu if you switch to it by clicking on its Dock icon.

Regards,

Jerry

Thanks, Jerry, for this advice. You are probably right about more RAM. I have noticed that it spins for a very long time (minutes) for ads to upload using Firefox and Yahoo email. So, more memory might solve that problem.

And I don't like unplugging it or making it quit in an unorthodox way. I know it may cause big problems down the road. But it's been the only way to get back control; otherwise, that ball keeps spinning for an eternity (at least it feels that way).

Kythera (cool name!)

The spinning beach ball means the application has not responded for a while, so Mac OS X is letting you know that the application s unresponsive. Often this means the app has crashed, but it can also mean whatever the application is doing takes a really long time. Force quitting is a good idea when this happens.

I feel the 1 GB of ram is the primary problem. Mac OS X is Unix and Unix likes memory - a lot. Today you cannot buy a new iMac from Apple with less than 4 GB of memory. It will be well worth the effort to have more memory added the the system. A local Apple store can do it for you, though if you have a techie friend (or you are comfortable with a screwdriver yourself) it is very easy to add memory to this model.

Flash can cause problems as well. Even though it is very popular, there are several different versions out there and they don't always play well together. I run Safari, and a free utility called ClickToFlash has helped greatly. Don't know about Firefox...

This machine should be really snappy - and the memory will help.

Hope this helps

Fred

Thanks, Frederic. I'll try adding memory - but not on my own!

My nickname is for the Greek island where the Goddess Aphrodite was born. It's sometimes spelled with a "C". My material grandparents came from it. It remains one of the unspoiled islands of Greece, and, because of that, attracts tourists from other European countries.

HERE'S A NEWSFLASH! I called Time Warner Cable to have the speed checked. They said my signal was too slow ! They've beam a new signal to their Roadrunner modem so I'll see if that improves the speed and gets rid of the BALL of DEATH!

So, in case this happens to you too, check with your cable company. They may be to blame!

I still will followup on the suggestions all of you have made.

Thanks for everything,
Kythera