Upgraded to 4gig of crucial memory, but still lagging

[glacierfanclub]

Good morning all,

This is my first post, and I greatly appreciate any help that may come my way.

My friend has a macbook that has been having performance issues as of late. She took it to the apple store, and they told her that it was due to her only having 2 gig of memory in her computer. A reasonable assessment, but after upgrading to 4 gigs of ram nothing has changed.

The problems will be the little swirly circular icon will come up on the screen that represents loading. Sometimes this will happen when she is running solely safari, but also happens more frequently when she is running multiple applications.

The only thing that I can think of is that she has used limewire on her computer in the past, but not frequently.

Is there anything that I can do to help get her computer running normally? If we completely reinstalled the operating system, would that work?

Thanks!

 

[Giaguara]

There are a number of things she can check.
So, now she has enough RAM. As she presumably won't be running a lot of games and virtual machines when the beachball attack happens, then it's probably not the total amount of RAM that is the issue there.
There should also be at least 15 % free space always on the boot drive for it to maintain its system smooth and self healing. So if there is a 100 GB HD (reported size) it should have 15 GB or more free. If there is less than that, it may become slow and odd things with software may start to happen. So if there isn't enough free space, free some.
The bad karma applications you list could also be bringing bad karma.
But after looking at basics (RAM = enough, HD size = to check etc) it would not be a bad idea to have a look that 1) system has all the updates it needs (so latest Mac OS X software updates are applied) and when the problem occurs, look at Console application for what happens. (/Applications/Utilities)
It will generate text for what the system is trying to do and that should help us define further why it's getting the beachball.