spinning wheel of death constantly please help!!!

Zaxusername

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I have a macbook 2.1ghz with OSX 10.5.8 running with 4gb of 667mhz DDR2

Recently I have been getting spinning beach balls of death on a constant biases. They come when I try to open web pages such as google, youtube, espn.com... ANYTHING actually. They come when I try to open applications, they seem to come when I try to do almost anything. I cannot force quit when they come. I have tried waiting for them to go away, sometimes up to an hour and nothing happens. They have come when I try to open utilities to try to figure out what is wrong. They come in safe mode.

I freed up hard disk space, over 60 gigs of the 120 gig hard drive. NOTHING.

I have run disk permissions like someone suggested to you, and that has done nothing.

I made another account for the computer, and that still receives the same amount of beach balls.

I tried updating software. Nothing.

I reinstalled the OS, nothing.

I switched the ram out with the ram that came with the computer, and I still get the beach balls.

I ran Onyx, and it said the drives are fine.

Yesterday out of sheer desperation I reformatted the whole thing. (former PC user) At first it looked ok, but then I began to update software and it locked up. Also, now when I open web pages I get a beach ball that SOMETIMES goes away after 5 minutes. Usually it just spins and spins mocking my existence.

What else can I try? What else can I do? I live in a place that makes it VERY VERY difficult to take to a mac mechanic. (South Korea) I've got a fresh install of the OS, am running 4 gigs of ram, have 80% of the hard drive free, have nothing downloaded on it.... WTF!!!???

I don't want to have to buy a POS PC netbook. Please advise.
 
AHT means Apple Hardware Test. got to site like ifixit.com and search youtube name of your mac and the words "takeapart" "take apart". search name of your laptop and take apart, take apart on web also.
 
is it hard to pull a hard drive out? can I use an external hard drive as the hard drive?

Macbooks are very easy to remove the drives from. If you've already swapped RAM, you've already done all the take apart needed to get the drive out. The drive is just to the left of the RAM slots. There is a tab tucked in. Pull the tab and the drive slides right out. Just make sure you transfer the drive carrier with the tab and the 4 hex screws that hold the carrier on the drive to the new drive. You can also use an external drive to boot from, but why bother when the internal drive is that easy to swap?
 
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